Aftertastes: An Ekphrastic Exhibition Experience

First published online at Jawbreaker Zine, August 2019

after GOMA’s Quilty Exhibition

I walk through the space like a kid lost in a funhouse, both deeply in awe and acutely disturbed. Ben Quilty has been one of my favourite Australian artists since I studied his work in high school. His work has an effect on me that I still struggle to articulate, even now.

Nostrils flare like a pair of black

holes, pull me closer to canvas

Quilty’s eye for the tactile, visceral human form juts out of every portrait. His textural paintings hook me in. Each one is an illuminated angler fish tugging me through the black.

Eye sockets sink into brioche

brain. My pupils find stem

I’d argue that his portraits overshadow his landscapes and take precedence over the exhibit. There’s just something so raw and radiant about the gaunt faces, the masculine bodies, the sad eyes. Quilty is a master of extracting human emotions through bodily representation.

leaking grey matter out of fore-

ground onto polished gallery floor

I take photos of the artworks I have admired since I was a teenager. I imagine how long Quilty took to make each piece, slicking layer upon layer of oil on canvas to distort his figures. They are rich with color and sharp in texture.

I taste smoked hickory. Face trickles

with sesame seeds. Bread blemishes across forehead

I gape at the abandoned life jackets from Seeking Refuge (2016), Quilty’s critique of the refugee crisis in Greece. Each piece is titled with the names of asylum seekers who had committed suicide in detention centers between 2016 and 2017. I read each one of them.

Lettuce spiders out between diced

onion teeth. Old English cheese flicks

I read how the “death jackets” were lethal. The materials used to make them absorbed water, ironically drowning the refugees they were designed to save. I take photos of the names and save them on my phone for later. There is a poem in this. I haven’t found it yet.

like a toxic yellow tongue

that I dodge and scurry away from

I see Sergeant P, after Afghanistan (2012). I’m reminded of an ekphrastic poem I wrote in response to it years ago and edited throughout university. I can taste his wet olive eyes rolling around in the bowl of his face and I remember how that poem ended.

Tomato slice gums grin at me as I go

Black beef hocked at back of throat

I find Joe Burger (2006). It hangs high above the rest of the paintings like it crawled up the wall of its own accord and nobody was game enough to retrieve it. Everyone in the gallery can smell the human burger, hear the fat sizzling on the grill, listen to the gurgling grease.

The sounds I hear are too guttural, tell

me my fortune without a split open

I hear it groaning, wheezing like a newborn. The eyes have barely opened yet. It has not seen me. I’m still digesting all its horrid, gorgeous colour, the uncanny shapes and jagged lines. Every part of me is alive. I can see it teething, smell it burning, taste it cooking, hear it screaming.

This skull sings death to every eye near

Here, this song is for you

Ben Quilty, Joe Burger, 2006, oil on canvas, 150.0 x 160.0cm. Photo Courtesy of the Artist.