Bloom, 2023, is a grid of eighty-four portrait-oriented watercolor paintings on paper, each separately titled. Approximately fifty feet long and five and a half feet high, it ran the entire length of the Anna Schwartz Gallery’s upstairs space, engulfing viewers in its loud interplay of color, text, and pattern. Among flashes of azure, maroon, and lime green, viewers could descry a diagonal streak of black-based units here or white-based ones there. These clusters offered fleeting evocations of a chessboard—confirmation, as if any were needed, that Bloom is an intellectual game to puzzle over and play, not simply a painting to behold.
The work’s structure is informed by James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). The first image (if we read the installation like a book) declares this relationship by quoting from the novel in salmon-colored type against a green bed of decorative shamrocks: MR. LEOPOLD BLOOM ATE WITH RELISH THE INNER ORGANS OF BEASTS AND FOWLS. The next panel borrows Joyce’s description of cheese as a CORPSE OF MILK, doubling down on the theme of the human consumption of animal products, which reverberates throughout the larger grid.
As with individual words and sentences in Joyce’s notoriously fractal book, each of Persson’s watercolors could be read inward, for its internal references, as well as outward, for the inferences that begin to multiply when read in relation to its neighbors. Duck Rabbit Problem, 2022, for example, displays a plated meat pie on a field of white fur, framed by its title written in a 1960s-style flower-power font. Raising the ethical issue of whether it is right to consume the flesh of other animals, it simultaneously evokes the rabbit/duck illusion (recalling, for Melbourne audiences, Kathy Temin’s iconic soft sculpture Duck–rabbit problem, 1991). Persson’s Peanut Butter Soup, 2023, depicts a bowl of brown sludge on a pristine white tablecloth flecked with dark-red droplets. The droplets might suggest wine (echoed in the 2022 painting to its right, containing a Ruscha-like treatment of the Homeric epithet WINE DARK SEA) or blood (implied by the one on its left, Cannibal Steak, also 2022).
That many of the works address the sacrifice of animals for human consumption serves to connect Bloom to Persson’s long-standing interest in the representational history of death and its relationship to the necrotic discourse of painting after modernism. Venetian Plating, 2022, draws parallels between drizzled and dripped glaze on plates of meat and paint expressively flung at a canvas. More directly, Try the Veal, 2022, features an impressionistically sketched calf whose right eye gazes out to empathically meet the viewer’s. Milk of the Mother, 2023, placed directly under Try the Veal and depicting a crumbed cutlet against a romantic pastoral wallpaper pattern comprising lambs and shepherdesses, invokes the Jewish prohibition against cooking an animal in the milk of its mother.
Themes pertaining to the industrial slaughter of animals in this work are nested within broader religious treatments of the cycle of life and mortality, spelled out unambiguously in the final painting in the grid, End of Story, 2022, which reads: BIRTH. COPULATION. DEATH. Persson evokes the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation in Bodies of Christ, 2022, which features sixteen white polka dots that puncture an oxblood-colored ground: eucharistic abstraction. To its left is a 2022 portrait of Saint Anthony, patron saint of butchers, flanked by overlapping rashers of bacon in lieu of the Coptic cross. Immediately above is a 2023 painting with five loaves of artisanal sourdough labeled LOAVES AND FISHES; to its left, a 2022 work featuring the fecund boughs of an apple tree and captioned THE BAIT OF EVE.
An endless number of associational paths crisscross Bloom, enfolding explorations of religious symbolism into stone-eyed critiques of anthropocentric capitalist consumption and the wellness industry (see Wellness Peebles, 2022, or Be Mindful, 2023). And this is to say nothing of the myriad other references to local artists (including Brook Andrew in Chiko Roll, 2023) or vernacular pub signage (see Parmageddon and the neighboring No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service, both 2023). In this idiosyncratic and highly playful project, Persson has created a four-dimensional geography of his medium that, even in its self-styled death, harbors the potential for radical transformation and renewal.
