Arts Page

‘Holey curtain empire’ with ‘Pavlovian panache’

That anyone should depict baths and curtains repeatedly in media ranging from charcoal to acrylic must mean that the painter is artistically washed up and wishes to hide the fact. However, Raille Faucet’s latest exhibition is more than simply bathtubs and window dressing. Rather, Mr Faucet has taken himself and us on a quest for knowledge in a strikingly refreshing environment.

Known as the Mr Clean among his peers, there is more to his soap-smelling forms than meets the nostrils. Instead of unveiling a new approach, he plays peek-a-boo with us as he hides his latest work behind the tantalising net curtains of the intellect and the heavier velveteen window coverings of our collective youthful consciousness.

Some of the finest canvases feature bathtubs with claw feet in imitation of Queen Anne occasional tables. Other bathwater receptacles are depicted with tidy, precision-cut and assembled panels with a trompe d’oeil effect such that the observer is unsure as to where the wall finishes and the panel begins. Faucet demonstrates his talent for rendering the mundane sublime, as shown in his taps of shining brass or chromium plating reflecting an absent bather. This is Escher taken to another plane, or tide-mark. Shower attachments are conspicuous by their absence. Mr Faucet told this reviewer that plastic curtains did not make his “hackles rise”.

’The wispy bamboo leaves, the surreal fish and cartoon octopuses are so 20th century,’ he said.

Otherwise, on the subject of window curtains, Mr Faucet’s eyes light up just as a fluorescent glow bursts through a chink in the chintz on an overcast November afternoon.

He sweeps his arm in front of a collection of charcoal and pencil studies of curtains – his ‘Holey Curtain Empire’ as he calls it, which, he quips, is moth-eaten in parts, yet an empire that yields a lot of curtain for your colón. And this has led to serious misunderstandings about Faucet’s curtain period. He refers to a typo in which the Costa Rican currency without the acute accent on the second ‘o’.

‘People were rushing to register for operations to have their intestines opened and have as many square metres of curtain material stuffed into their colon and duodenum,’ he related. But that might be fake news to boost sales of both curtain material and his work.

If true, curtain-material-filled guts might have made wonderful living sculptures, as long as the models did not mind ever attempting to digest food for the rest of their lives.

‘There’s violence in them thar curtains,’ he drawls in his native Parisian slang. ‘I see a pair of curtains and immediately I experience a white flash behind my eyes.’

He explains why with Pavlovian panache.

‘When I was a teenager, my father used to tell me, “Draw the curtains” so I mimed an artist preparing to render the curtains on an imaginary sketch pad,’ Mr Faucet began. ‘Then, Wham! He would hit me at the back of the head: the punishment for insolence in my father’s house.’

’But I drew the curtains all right, and I’ll have the last gurgle of the plug hole, since my father asked me to draw a bath for my mother, which I did. She liked the bath in oils, yet she drew the line at bathing in them. Meanwhile, my father whacked me in the back of the head.

‘Critics, who needs them?’

Raille Faucet’s ‘Baths and Curtains’ exhibition is open until Friday 13th, when it will be transferred to Baden-Baden, Germany.

Oppen-ing doors

Few horses are known for being able to count to ten, let alone remembering the first four letters of the alphabet, but this latter-day Boxer is even more limited.

Said his owner, Gordon Alamo, ‘He wouldn’t know what to do with a brush if you stuck it to his hoof with Blutak™ and moved it for him!’ Instead, Alamo tried out various commands on the now ennobled nag, Oppenheimer, known as ‘Oppen’ for short. Inspiration came to Alamo after a hearing-impaired neighbour had bought a troika by mistake at an auction. The neighbour alleged the auctioneer had described lot 17 as a three-wheeled vehicle for a small child. This conveyance was also fitted with doors and a roof since the previous owners were snow-averse Russian choir boys.

‘Sound like bloody cissies to me,’ Pardoner said, adding that one day he arranged all the horses – Oppen among them – in a circle around the troika parked in the yard outside the stables. The command he gave was barely audible. Oppen trotted towards the troika, opened one door by manipulating the handle with his teeth. He opened the other door likewise. Then he resumed his place in the circle. All the while, Alamo captured the entire sequence on film, of which the loop is projected onto a blank wall of Oppen’s stable. The installation is entitled One horse, open sleigh!

Alamo’s current project is a bid to immortalize a moment when his brother, Seth, slipped on his wife’s pearl necklace and hurt his rear-end.

‘He felt more a dented ego than a bent bum,’ he quipped. ‘Seth took the necklace and crushed it underfoot in the stable yard.’

Oppen allegedly watched Seth taking his anger out on the piece of jewellery. Since the steed had earned the soubriquet ‘One horse open sleigh’, he let himself out of his stable after a much calmer Seth had left and proceeded to stamp on the necklace with iron-shod hooves. Alamo happened to be walking past at the time. He also happened to have his camera phone on him.

Echoing the horse’s namesake, Alamo created another installation in Oppenheimer’s stable. Both installations, Now, I am become Seth, the destroyer of pearls and One horse open sleigh! can be viewed at the Tate Modern on 16-20 June.