Southwark Park Galleries, London
Factual Actual: Ensemble is a performance about painting, and painting as performance, that feels like an open-ended ritual
On hands and knees, her paint-scuffed boiler suit pulled down to her waist and her breasts bared, the dancer is being covered with paint. She jolts as the cold paint hits her, hands smearing it on to her torso and down her back,finger-painting it over her face.
I thought the dancer was about to have her wet body pressed on to the canvas she was crouching on, just like one of Yves Klein’s living female stencils in his highly theatrical Anthropometries live painting-performances made over 60 years ago. Instead, Florence Peake’s performer has a microphone shoved in her face and she begins reading the first of several hand-transcribed fragments of art historical commentary, going on about solipsistic pleasures and the abstract surface, grim parodies of sexual union and something about Cézanne’s 1877 painting The Eternal Feminine. It is all a jumble of windy wordage culled from the art books and catalogues whose open pages are strewn about on the floor nearby. All these books on Titian, Courbet, Vermeer, Magritte, Pollock, and other white male canonical artists – and their equally canonical critics – are the sort of thing painters or art historians might keep lying about the place to give them inspiration or a bit of intellectual heft.
