On the first hot day of summer, a midday performance of Florence Peake’s Factual Actual: Ensemble, 2023, took place in the cool and cavernous hall of Dilston Grove, a deconsecrated church on the edge of Southwark Park in southeast London. From the wooden beams of the high vaulted ceiling hung seven large unstretched canvases—each attached to a rope clipped to one corner, falling in a conical drape. The paintings were multicolored, mostly gauzy abstractions, although sketchy outlines of bodies could be glimpsed here and there. A shining white sheet of vinyl lined the floor; audience members wore foot covers or took off their shoes to protect it.
Over the next hour, six performers—all female identifying or nonbinary—engaged in a kind of dance, or perhaps a merging, with the canvases: raising and lowering them via a system of pulleys, hanging them on the wall, laying them flat, dragging them around, collapsing onto them, and wrapping each other up like parcels. Around the halfway mark, a performer reentered the space in a strange costume of dangling “medallions”: thick swirls of paint on blob-shaped boards, one piece covering her face so that she had to feel her way around. She was occasionally assisted by Peake and her producer, Nikki Tomlinson. Later, another performer proceeded down the hall with bare stretchers hanging from neck and arms. And in a climactic finale more people got involved: Viewers were invited to select passages of text from a stack of art books (Cézanne, Chardin, Vermeer, Byzantium, and so on). The extracts were transcribed live and then intoned into a microphone by a performer stripped to the waist and rolling around in wet paint. This action was set against an increasingly layered soundtrack of vocal and nonvocal noises run through a loop pedal. When the audio was switched off, the crowd erupted into applause.
I had already seen the performance in dress rehearsal and was equally captivated both times. While nonnarrative, Factual Actual is also clearly structured, with a strong forward propulsion. Charged with affective power, it is by turns funny (the flailing limbs of the performer laden with stretchers got a loud laugh) and frightening (the figures shrouded in canvas sometimes seemed eerily still). It gives plenty to think about, too. The performance I saw formed part of a project that Peake began in 2020, with the artist lying on canvases and painting around her moving body. In 2021, the National Gallery in London staged the first live version of the work. Since then, the artist has produced more paintings and drawings, including a 150-foot-long frieze created collaboratively and presented in Southwark Park in a gallery near the church. The title refers to what Peake has called the “awful schism” between the sensation of having a body and its “factual” appearance in the eyes of others. How do you represent that experience?
As Peake is aware, this is a question that has long occupied artists, and the performance of Factual Actual was saturated with allusions to predecessors, from the figures painted by the old masters and Impressionists to the frame-exploding practices of Rebecca Horn, Yves Klein, and Carolee Schneemann. Peake’s contribution to this legacy offered no definitive answer. Rather, it was an open-ended exploration of how, via a blend of movement and mark-making, the body might itself become a painting—and the painting itself a body.
— Gabrielle Schwarz