The Slab

What interests me in the old masters, more than their motifs, is their rhythm — the way a composition breathes, accumulates, repeats itself. In Snyders, the stall overflows with game and fowl piled without modesty, flesh heaped until it saturates the whole surface, and a cat watches from one corner, as it always does in his work. I keep that rhythm but reverse its weight: a single body replaces the ten Snyders would have lined up, and the opulence turns almost into emptiness. It is in that emptiness that the fall takes place — a body tipping over rather than a body posing, offered in its rawest vulnerability. The scene is violent in what it shows, but keeps a touch of burlesque in the way it shows it, as if the grotesque were the only bearable way to say something so bare. This exposed body asks for nothing — neither to be found beautiful, nor to be found acceptable. It is simply there, with nothing to soften it.