Chamber Music in Peaches #02, Fall / Winter 2025

Twenty years ago, or thereabouts, Paul’s work took up residence inside of me. It has felt uniquely personal, this occupancy; though I have heard, and often from their own mouths, of others being occupied too. I’ve never doubted these confessions because, while there aren’t any outward signs, today, right now even, if a hundred people, more, were lined up in front of me (Les Samurai style) I would have no hesitation pulling the right one aside, retreating behind a curtain, and sharing what this means. 

With words. With staring at an indeterminate point in the middle distance (never on a wall).  With vague hand gestures. And so on. We would leave each other, this person and I, with a shared sense of being wounded a little on account of it how close and how far apart it feels to cruise the internalised intimate alterity of this coupled couple, their half drunk beers, their backs so often to us; and hurt, in a way, by the strange half-lidded vulnerability we reveal in our need to ruminatively guard the known of these figures (who we’re so used to insuating psyche to soma up and down the tendrils of our nervous system) against the perilous sublimity of their, our unknown (those cavernous echoes of an end hitting with a certain erupting velocity, not unlike how vapour trails sound, not unlike how a suddenly unconscious body falls, its own nervous system muted into pure weight). To be left, then, as ever, with an entwining of clean-up rituals,  wobblyingly happy, shyly dazed, our towels drying, our sausages hot and ready to eat, at a small table in a chilly, summer kitchen.  

In the world of psychology (or is it psychoanalysis?) there’s a term, projective identification. Coming from Klein it describes this thing where someone kind of lodges their feelings inside of you, so they don’t have to have them anymore. You might feel inhabited by unusual responses, a surprise agitation, a brooding glumness. But then, you look down the hall, nothing, no footsteps either.  That was all the proof you needed that this theory was half right at best, and that whatever Badiou wrote about whatever Guyotat wrote was in true fact the more resonant summary of the inward-opening-out that we might find in Paul’s own (admittedly differently styled) ‘declaration of all things as equal to the universe’. 

It’s not, therefore, that Paul has made these works with his partner Peter that share aspects of their coupledom over the years, and that make us feel we know them somehow, and so find that we have introjected them. I hate the egregious banality of that take; it misses everything that is happening, everything at stake. It misses how Paul’s images are never ‘images of’ breakfasts, lunches, collapse and prolapse, short day squeezing and long day lolling, arses and moustaches. It misses the exact way they are alignments of the universe’s teemingly hectic impartiality that lodges in and dislodges us from our splendid nests and psychic cocoons through which ensuing, enmeshing turbulence we nonetheless continue to fashion home-like people and home-like spaces, upon which he confers the grace of their full radiance.   

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The title of this small piece is from Alain Badiou’s essay ‘ Pierre Guyotat, Prince of Prose’ in The Age of the Poets and other writings on twentieth-century poetry and prose, 2014, Verso: London. It reads, ‘Confer its full radiance on what ordinarily is only half-said or suspiciously left in the shadow’. P195.  The line ‘declaration of…’ ibid.