The door is a riddle unanswered by time. The hinge was the first wheel. A door is two faced, just as we all have been trained to be. But a door is actually six sided. We are never without the spectre of a “door,” whoever invented that word. We are either outdoors or indoors. Even when we are indoors we are in a corridoor. A painting is a six sided betrayal. You can also say inside and outside if you are talking about the doors of your rectum. When we are in a corridor we look at a painting on a wall dictated by a door—that has the shape of a door, that has the shape of a painting without a flip side. Betrayal is the law. When doors aren’t shut they are ajar. Paintings were originally made for people who couldn’t read. Paintings are made from jars.
Faulkner once said: “All I need is 4 walls and a door I can walk through and a door to close behind me.”
Maybe I need 16 walls but these walls are made of paper. They are made of nothing. Look at the Eagle’s nest. I hesitate to tell anyone what a door is, because it governs all of us.
These doors were someone else’s doors. As soon as I pass through a door it is not my door anymore.
The door is the first Frame. Film and painting—they are just frames. Why do we look at frames? Why do we fuck behind doors? Look at the Eagle’s nest. The empty room in the background, the azure strangeness of those folds, the dialectics of the invisible.
This is an internalization of San Marco, Florence, where Fra(u) Angelico anticipated themes of repetition, an unending corridoor where there’s either a crucifix or an annunciation in front of and behind every door. I couldn’t even count how many doors when I was there. This gallery where you are holding this piece of paper, also a two sided door, has a corridor that vaguely matches the corridoor of the suburban house I grew up in. Where my Father now, seen in the videos, sinking into dementia, is opening and closing doors. They are intercut with images of me, his prototype, however in Jeanne Dielman drag, doing the parody work of a hermit’s studio, where there are unnecessarily too many doors impeding my progress. The handles bruise me over and over again. This is an attempt to understand something 500 years ago. I even used egg yolk to see how they did it. This is a correspondence. To my father’s doors and my doors. To the eggs of my father and the eggs I painted with.
To the doors he shut and the doors I let be shut. Doors are authoritarian…but they are also arbitrary, just like Duchamp said.
Why do you need a door? Or an answer for a door? The door is your prison
of representation. The door is the the estranged repetition you experience every minute. Representation is not unhinged, it’s two faced. And we all go through it.
—SGR, Berlin, 2023
at Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin
until January 6, 2024