Slatterns

A cento for Angela Dufresne

When I first met Angela she was painting landscapes

Copulating couples were hidden in Where’s Waldo style

Freud, or a generic white-bearded psychiatrist, occasionally makes an appearance

Sometimes the artist features herself

The Villa Huppert for the Passage of Macedonia (2005) is an imagined holiday home for Isabelle Huppert

There’s a small painting inspired by Hitchcock’s Rear Window (a film so much about the gaze) and a number of drawings from that era of Angela’s career

Woman on woman, man on man, woman on man, celebrities and film stars anachronistically paired in strange architectural monstrosities

The figures stirred in me an inexplicable sense of identification

& I found, to my surprise, I was weeping

Notes:

“Slatterns” uses text by Kathryn Maris from her introduction to the catalog for the Slatterns exhibition at the APT Gallery, London (2018).

Source: Poetry (January 2021)