Hugo Pictor's Ekphrastic Dog Hypnosis
Antoine Duchenet’s 50 sketches & a bird, Peter Downsbrough, ekphrastic with a blue backdrop, The Thieves go sci-fi, Moyra Davey hypnotises dogs, Henrot and Hoy share oranges
Hugo Pictor was thinking image and text, but The Book Pile had its own ideas, so he had spent the afternoon with 50 sketches & a bird, a new paperback by Antoine Duchenet, an artist based between Paris and Caen, which contained no words at all.
Instead, Hugo Pictor could go back and forth, or move wildly around, its sequence of fifty-one images, one per page. Actually, Hugo Pictor was a front-to-back-&- beginning-to-end kind of reader. Maybe that was why he’d come to this book at this time, to ask: did its flow of small images possess something of the fictional novella?
The images seemed to be unevenly shaped fragments cut or torn from larger works- on… paper? Card? Canvas? They were photographed with small areas of shadow around them, as if slightly raised from the surface on which they sat. The size of fragments varied: some sat centrally filling the page, whilst the most miniature were only a couple of centimetres in height and width.
Many contained an array of abstract colour markings, that likely continued beyond its edges. Others had collaged elements: strips of painted canvas arranged on painted canvas, or cardboard placed on canvas, with holes punched to reveal the layer below.
Hugo Pictor stared at a black and white photograph on the back cover that seemed deliberately indistinct. An array of papers and objects on the studio floor? Its mass formed an irregular composition similar to the individual fragments in watercolour, acrylic and pencil on each page. If the fifty-one images suggest an elegant choreography of gesture, light, and space, the studio emphasised a mess, disorder and darkness that reminded Hugo Pictor of the more chaotic biomes of the Book Pile.
Duchenet’s book isn’t completely without texts. It ends with a short essay titled Crooked Painting (written in French, translated into English by Adriane Emerit):
This book presents all the compositions imagined during a series of experiments, carried out in December 2023, from recent works, bygone projects and drowsy scraps. Freeform shapes, cut-outs or succinct combinations, were reproduced in full scale then brought together and organised into a collection, blending barrel scrape-ups and new unseen attempts.
Made from heterogenous elements, these improvisations revolve around “painting fragments”, chosen then modified by one or many specific operations, lead by observation: collage, cutting, assembling, cropping; executed on scraps or portions of pre-existing work.
Duchenet’s description was less casual and chance-inflected than Hugo Pictor had intuited. Rather than a poetics of the discarded, thrown away, overlooked, the artist is “picking out the most instructive parts of an object and ridding it of its dross”.
As for how the pages added up to some imagistic novella, Hugo Pictor felt drawn to that ‘actual size’. To read through the book was to shift restlessly between larger and smaller shapes and areas, like clunky film-flow in the projector of a proto-cinema made of furniture stuck on film strips. How the project embedded a painting practice in technology was also the conclusion of Duchenet’s essay:
From their uneven edges and slightly awkward framing, these compositions’ snippets sprout on the scanner screen, before their isolation and pagination in neutral backgrounds vignettes. Thanks to them, painting moves from its own remnants and reprocessed memory samples, towards the production of new pictorial options. Crooked painting, I’d say, with scissor cuts and hasty projections.
Sometimes, though, it was crooked typography that took Hugo Pictor’s attention, as in Peter Downsbrough’s new book from Edition Taube. The publisher’s themselves titled the book on their website AS, THEN but when Hugo Pictor looked at the cover (above) that was not exactly what he saw.
What does it mean to reverse your ‘AS’ ? A sense of defamiliarisation, it also organised a statement less around a comma than a whole new axis. Hugo Pictor felt he was inside or behind the book, looking out from a position where ‘AS’ was the right way round, but what then for ‘THEN’?, which was also Hugo Pictor’s preferred state.
All of which was an apt introduction to Downsbrough’s book - and decades of such considerations in book form - with its minimal sequencing and strategies of presentation for photos, pages, lines, letters, black squares, graphed paper. Not really a work of image and text, Hugo Pictor reflected, because such precise images of the built environment approached a condition of language, whilst Downsbrough’s manipulation of typography made it an element in that landscape of his attention.
There were plentiful white spaces, too: amongst the other elements as they were arranged on a single page, also through whole pages left blank that functioned as interval, statement, punctuation, landscape. With no separation of figure and ground, or positive and negative, the whole of AS, THEN is thickly, materially, philosophical.
Hugo Pictor liked to say ‘minimal’ but really the emotions the book stirred in him were the opposite. It was like some kind of immersive installation, a Ghost train ride for conceptual, bookish types like himself, where the leaping out skeletons and hanging ectoplasm were present as a straight line, the deft operation of a reversed AS.
Sometimes Hugo Pictor wanted to be a bit more, well, ekphrastic. It was time to extract from the Book Pile the recently published with a blue backdrop for company Its ingenious design kept images and texts apart in separate pamphlets, even as page fold and bindings could cause them to superimpose, collage and unfold in a curiouser reciprocity. A small bookmark fell out, to tell Hugo Pictor that this book began in a specific time and place: 28th February 2024 at 105 French Street G40 4EH:
This pamphlet is an exercise in unraveling, it aims to reverse a faltering technique - ekphrasis - traditionally heralded as the verbal depiction of visual art.
We tasked Gabriella Day with an experiment, inviting her to craft responses in paint to text submitted by our readers for the night.
The central question is one of representation. Perhaps more interestingly, the paintings disrupt the temporal schema of language.
The hope is that this stilling of language will reveal something previously taken for granted, as the saying goes: language is language is language.
First up in the text pamphlet: GF Ramsay’s ‘How Vertical and Horizontal fell out’ is an Aesop-evoking fable in which up surging mountains, the formation of atmosphere, or birds learning to fly, may be responsible for H & V’s new found animosity.
Making fictional characters of Horizontal and Vertical enacted Hugo Pictor’s belief that formal properties of a painting may best be discussed through an animation into absurdity. Day’s response? The pamphlet of paintings begins by extracting from Ramsay’s text a green plastic chair (How… concludes “I see both sides, so sit, quivering undecided/ in my green plastic garden chair/ tethered to the ground,/ and dreaming of the sky.’).
But Day’s painting makes an ending a beginning, one whose invitation is to sit and contemplate all the images that follow. Rather than ‘extracting’ the painted chair is an indeterminate thing, both foregrounded and veiled, flattened to the picture plane and evoking spatial depth, quickly participant in a webs of ideas and experiences beyond any ‘illustration’ of Ramsay’s text. An entangled, moving, argumentative ekphrastic.
Elsewhere, Caitlin Merrett King contributed a physical and mental prose narrative of a woman sat in public toilet cubicle, whilst Saoirse Wall’s floor/bed/prone offered a small litany of sensations and objects in a sleep soaked singing consciousness between affirmation, absence, evocation - ‘yes spiced tea/ yes joop soap/ no garlic/ no piss/…/o bouillon sweat/ o butter toast.”
Cut to Day’s pamphlet where these nouns become both written bold and strikethrough-ed in a microscopic sea of almost-biomorphism. Day returns repeatedly to the motif of a seated, solitary figure, evoking King’s narrator, but also voices in other contributions by Amelia Barratt, Sean Wai Keung, and Jude Browning.
Hugo Pictor had a tentative conclusion shaped like a biscotti: direct illustration, yes, but as the design made clear, there was also a gap between image and text. In that gap - closing one booklet, opening another- the questions of what was source and what response got productively confused, the images formed new allegiances, things got forgotten, re-attributed. All of this told to Hugo Pictor by an insistent green chair.
Then Hugo Pictor wondered if it was worth smuggling a green chair into his sense of what was going in the eighty pages of The Thieves, with its pink card covers. Hugo Pictor meant metaphorically, but then again, he was sitting in a green chair as it happened, and having an explosive ekphrastic experience, so he couldn’t be sure.
The Thieves was open about its circumstances of production. In 2022, Josie Perry and Francis Jones began to make an exhibition based on some written fragments by Jones that appear here, also called The Thieves. Amongst Perry’s drawings were ‘portraits of writers, artists and activists, who live or have lived in Glasgow’: Hussein Mitha, Nat Lall, Gloria Dawson, and Isaac Harris. Each contributes a text to the book, and postcards of Perry’s portraits of two of the four are inlaid in each book.
Already Hugo Pictor felt invited to view the ekphrastic within wider exchanges of conversation, relationship, economics and care. As their introduction observes:
Each person has reckoned with the harsh political stakes of being a writer/ artist within our current reality, and understands the simultaneous need for collective action and thought in response/ antagonism. This project encapsulates a specific instance of all of us coming together. I am very glad to know such remarkable comrades.
Francis Jones text is a response to the reality of being a ‘precarious, low-waged worker.’ Its narrator is a cleaner in the city, writing poems in a notebook, although we’re in a futurist sci-fi framework: a ‘dialled up’ weather that glitches and pixellates, whilst even the poorly rewarded, destructive labour of cleaning is only a nostalgic performance for the rich as the technology of self-cleaning houses is available.
The notebook poems are a private stage for what society denies: a lover in a world without relationships, a place of acknowledgement and grief when the death of a joke-telling colleague is otherwise unacknowledged. Without giving away the ending, a promised escape involves the notebook page taking revolutionary, invitational form.
Other contributors also speak from the future to try create possibility and liberation in the present. Nat Lall’s screenplay Pink Excavation transcribes a 2018 film set in 2518 in the aftermath of The Online War. In the film, “Nat" sets about exploring a past of ‘secret cultures, minority cultures, queer cultures’. Whilst ‘Nothing remains at surface level’ the plan is “to explore, to hunt, to excavate these missing, secret cultures.’ So:
N: First up, I need to dress the part. So I bought some hi-vis clothing to make sure I would be safe and seen at the dangerous archaeological sites I wished to visit. I looked strong. I looked butch. But still pretty and camp, too. I looked good enough to be motivated to research into safety uniforms more. And you know what? I looked the part, and I felt the part. I was ready to explore.
Hugo Pictor looked at the drawing by Perry on the front cover. Its starting point would seem to be a moment in the Jones text where the poet-worker is dangled by his ankles over the frier at work. Perry’s scenography could be a nightclub, a space station control room, a kitchen sink unit showroom. The frame made it a tarot card, bringing the pack’s sense of archetype and prophecy, interpretation and question.
As Jones says of Perry’s painting, it demonstrates “the yearning to access a kind of waking-dream in which one can think, plan, and dissociate one’s way into the future.” This suggested something to Hugo Pictor…. something.. . what was it? Was it orange?
But, before he could unfold this colour impression any further, Hugo Pictor stumbled over his ankle-high pile of Moyra Davey catalogues. Whilst Index Cards presented a determined, collected essayist, Hugo Pictor always preferred the texts in their original publications, allowed an orchestration of text and image amidst white page-theatres.
In I Confess, Davey begins with her own restless picking up and putting down of books, before she settles on James Baldwin’s 1962 novel Another Country. Through Davey’s small paragraphs of attention and recall, each focussed on a distinct affective encounter bookish or otherwise, Baldwin’s text soon gets juxtaposed with Québécois revolutionary Pierre Vallières, and Ottawa-based political philosopher Dalie Giroux, both their writings and Davey’s personal encounters with and near them.
Indeed, Davey’s encounters with books and people are always folded into her apartment, friends, dog, lovers, pencils, bodies, laptop, memories. Essaying appears energised by a rhythm of emergence dependent on both familiar and unexpected. Arrangements of images develop this process in ways both wilder and perfunctory.
Hugo Pictor picked up another Davey book, in which her photographs were placed alongside those of Peter Hujar. Davey noted how other artists and photographers in New York admired Hujar’s photographs of dogs and horses, seeing him as having a capacity to “hypnotise” them in the sitting that no other photographers had.
Pictor wondered about this situation of hypnosis. A holding something in relation to you, that is also subsumed in a strange, heightened, interiority of its own. Was this a similar state to the one he was seduced into by the Peter Downsbrough book? By the power of Duchenet’s scanned fragments? By the image of Davey at work (above) that also appeared in I Confess? Was this any different to when Hugo Pictor shouted the dog’s name, it looked at him, and he took a picture on his smartphone? Ekphrastic.
Finally, where was Hugo Pictor now? It was Bexhill-on-Sea again and as he looked around at the bus stop it seemed very similar to what he had just read:
Under orange moon and orange waters, she sat on a canal in Venice, logging her defence of Nietzschean Dracula with more than enough time on her hands.
This sentence came from Jus d’Orange, a collaboration of Camille Henrot and Estelle Hoy, which also took the form of an exhibition. In an essay for the book, Chiara Nuzzi sums up the effect of an ongoing exchange of hundreds of images and messages as part of Henrot and Hoy’s close friendship:
Like an orange squeezed for its juice, the artists draw each emotion of life in a non-linear, disorganized, and often disobedient process; everything gets mixed up, feeling lost while trying to stay afloat. We are invited to choose bewilderment over direction and to read the components as open and polyphonic forms. Jus d’Orange does not offer a safe way forward, rather it accompanies us in the confusion of our existence.
That said, the book in hand was ordered and condensed: two prose sequences by Hoy with carefully numbered sections, amongst Henrot’s paintings that came before, after and around each text. The paintings were labelled and catalogued in the end matter, but they were full bleed in the text itself, so worked like Duchenet’s fragments: as small, extracted, heightened microcosms of gesture, colour, body and form.
What was the tone? Hoy’s text was heightened, fantastical, absurd, bodied, sharp in the guise of a worldly, art world and theory savvy narrator. When Hoy’s second text overloads with cultural references - Andrea Fraser, Jackson Pollock, Roland Barthes, The Whitney - it can suggest - like the use of scf-fi in The Thieves - that a satirical, wise cracking, romping exaggeration might be the only way to keep the profession of art writer/ artist out of the clutches of overly reverential, sycophantic, hagiography.
All of this can be seen as deriving from/ with Henrot’s images, but the painter seems freer to access such an energy and quest whilst also remaining archetypal, fluid, primal, metamorphic. Sometimes the book does show writer and artist in one-to-one:
P.31: Henrot’s watercolour Fruitful Labour (above) offers wavy, skeletal outlines that speak variously and inconclusively of lovers, mothers, anatomies, self-obsessions, ghosts, care and grief. Hoy’s facing text concludes:
They saw in her the classic themes of a woman suffering: pink cotton coddling her breasts, strands of black hair, slanted eyes smudged in charcoal, standing in odd postures. Quivering blood ran through her wrists, the scented ichor of her mother, her Other, a woman fluent in unease and drifting agony. Etsuko wasn’t suffering; she was studying stillness.
Things pass, and sometimes they don’t.
Like Hoy, Hugo Pictor recognised the necessity of “Lovebirds in a Quaalude wake”. Was there really different possibility in paint than words? Henrot, as if answering this question, offered pages of bodies mutable, into moons and dogs and a headless three graces, leaving Hoy to riposte how, just like Hugo Pictor and the Book Pile:
Bodega receptions and a respectable liquid lunch are entirely more virtuous than low-lit ballrooms, fancy horseshoe driveways, and tiered cakes in cracked strawberry marzipan.
It was late. HP looked at himself suspiciously in the bathroom mirror as he cleaned his teeth. Everything is source and respond, mark-making, transformation. Hugo Pictor thought again of a ghost train, the lurch in the darkness, of low-budget space travel, the clear and minimal image and text of ectoplasm and sudden out-leaping skeletons.