Saint Sebastian's Abyss by Mark Haber

Author:Mark Haber
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Coffee House Press

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There lies a nothingness, a hopeless expanse that’s always drawn me more to the second lesser painting than the first. Needless to say, both works are repugnant and abominable, works that, if Schmidt and I had our way, wouldn’t exist. Still, the second untitled painting strikes me as a work more at ease with its dreary and accursed existence than in battle with its dreary and accursed existence. The second untitled work, or monkey painting, is quieter and less aggressive. The second untitled work, or monkey painting, allows the eyes to rest a bit. This is what I told Schmidt when he asked about my preference for the second monkey painting over the first monkey painting. The second untitled work, which hangs on the right side of Saint Sebastian’s Abyss in the Rudolf Gallery, whose mission is apparently to make Count Hugo Beckenbauer’s three remaining works a monstrous triptych of sorts, is also eight feet by twenty, enormous and encroaching, a still life that boasts a bowl of rotting fruit—pears, black grapes, plums—as well as a glass of red wine and a candle. Mosquitos in the foreground, poised along the ridge of the glass, suggest obliteration, doom, and decay, endowing the work with a theatrical quality that forces the viewer to wonder if the artist is mocking them. The plums, painted in thick, saturated brushstrokes, lie in shadow while the rest of the fruit, festering and spoiled, sits in an opaque light. Both above and below the center of the painting is an abyss, a dozen or so inches of black space and standing several yards away one wouldn’t suspect there was any paint there at all, as though the bowl of fruit, the heart of the still life, had been painted on a canvas too large for it. Closer though, one sees layers of dark paint, brutal and impassioned. Schmidt termed the color bruised charcoal. I called it weeping sable, the title, in fact, of my seventh book, Weeping Sable, a tiny book-length essay that explores the colors used in Saint Sebastian’s Abyss as well as the second untitled painting. The dark areas above and below the fruit are infused with mystery and are easily my favorite parts of the second monkey painting, since they allow the eyes to wander away from the painting itself, which is truly atrocious, giving the viewer, that is us, a reprieve from Beckenbauer’s horrible attempt at a still life. I appreciate the blank space and acknowledge the blank space and, in some respects, feel indebted to the blank space both above and below the center of the work as it allows me to avoid the center of the work itself and reflect on other things, a meadow bathed in diaphanous light or the billowy arms of a bygone lover, or perhaps the murmuring of a winding stream, and on some occasions, moving my eyes slightly, imperceptibly to the left, I steal a glance at the unrivaled sublimity of the central painting, Saint Sebastian’s

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