-Caitlin MacDonald
It is an unsettled still life. Behind the body is a blackness, disturbed by thick jagged striations of brown and blue paint, suggesting the details of a room, perhaps -- the open door, the end of a table, a figure hovering at the edge of the frame. A rayfish is suspended in this darkness by some unseen apparatus, exposing a red-pink underside, an open mouth. Its pectoral fin billows and puckers, as if the body were still animated, swimming upwards, a bloodied and ugly angel. The paint’s heaviness gives opacity to the flesh. Harsh brushstrokes reiterate forms: lines of blue restate the ray’s gills at the outer reach of its fin, blood-logged shadows pool red at the bends of the body, cords of gold pull at the corner of the gaping mouth and the wound at its stomach. Viscera unspools. Intestines tumble onto a table laden with the genre's traditional subjects: a cloth, two vases, one holding a paintbrush, and a pile of apples. The fruit, unctuous and red, almost seems to pitch from the maw of the rayfish's gut; some are so ripe that they split at their core. The table sags under the scene, caving at its center; it is as if the force of the painting is pinched at the base. An apostrophe of red writhes in the air around the skate's snout.
Formal traditions contend on the surface. First there is the broader sway of Expressionism, the innervated, post-war, pre-war, shell-shocked urge to turn oneself inside out. Paint leaves an intractable image of the body, mediating and fossilising movement and archiving affect, want, mind. It is this impetus that pulls the centrifugal force of the still life out of orbit, that drags it down and out of frame, that sends objects careening on either side of the bend.
Then there is the mode of the still life -- a claim to holiness, in the tender gesture of assemblage, in the humane rendering of these mundane object-subjects. Holy the rayfish carcass! Holy the rickety table! Holy the rotting apples! The human form necessarily is absent but invoked through inhuman comparison. You too bleed. Your flesh beneath the skin is as pink and diaphanous as the skate’s underside. Your organs are as slick and globular as these apples. The agape nostrils and mouth of the fish mimic a naive illustration of a human face, held in a grotesque, incomplete smile. There is something reverent in the rendering of a butchered body, some insistent propulsion, a call to witness a sacrifice. When Marcel Proust wrote of Jean-Simeon Chardin’s “The Ray”, he dilated the body of that “strange monster” to the proportions of religious monument, describing “its delicate immense structural design tinted with red blood, azure nerves, and white sinews like the nave of a polychrome cathedral.”
Then there is the man. It was Chaïm Soutine who painted the disembowelled rayfish. Born in a shtetl at the edge of the Russian Empire and at the end of the nineteenth century, he was the ninth of ten children. His was a lean world. Eating other animals was confined to a ritual conference of sin to the body of a slaughtered bird. “You for death, me for life,” ends one prayer. Soutine recalls witnessing a slaughter and an inexpressible cry forming at the back of his throat. He recalled once: “When I painted the flayed ox it was still this cry that I wanted to free. I could never do it.” There is a dream logic, a psychic logic, between slaughter, the cry, and image-making as expulsion. Soutine grew up with an ancient law that forbids figurative representation. But this compulsion to create likeness, the desire to rid himself of the scream at the back of the throat, was enough for Soutine to contravene this law. He was beaten to the point of near death for making a portrait of a local religious figure and, once recovered, with a piecemeal sum of compensation his mother won on his behalf, he left for Paris where he was often hungry and painted the carcasses of cows and rayfish and rotting flesh he was given to eat, and chefs and busboys and lambs, and crooked landscapes. After seeing some success, he died of a bleeding stomach ulcer in the middle of the Second World War.
Sometimes, when I look at this painting, I just see a wound -- a triangular gash in the blackened hide of the painting.
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