”To be in the margin is to be part of the whole but outside the main body.”
– bell hooks
”No sooner do I see an egg than I have seen an egg for the last three thousand years.”
– Clarice Lispector
Oranges are not the only fruit I see as I enter the room. I see cherries too, 78 lustrous examples of cherries piled up on a canvas in the far-back corner of the room, and a bunch of bleary blobs that must be pears. Two carrots and a banana peek out of a shopping bag dangling from the arm of a scantily clad woman. An apple and yet another pear sit on top of each other on a wire curving out of the woman’s extravagant headpiece. A pair of generic apples are unknowingly left or knowingly placed next to a terracotta bowl on a table.
Oranges may not be the only fruit, but oranges are what catch my eyes, are, in fact, what gets me going. Take, for example, the two rather inconspicuous oranges pressed against each other on a pink plate set on a wooden floor in a room with dirty walls and a weeping view from a fairly modest window. The orange color of the fruit contrasts nicely with the pink of the plate and the red ochre of the floor, but beyond that, there is nothing particularly distinctive about either. In fact, if I were to recall those oranges from memory, I wouldn’t be entirely sure they weren’t apricots.
There’s another orange in the room I can’t help but notice. It’s larger than some of its neighbors, smaller than others, and rests in the hand of a now fairly famous woman named Meret. I don’t ask myself what the extraordinary orange in Meret’s hand is doing, nor whether the reason it lies so comfortably there has anything to do with the privilege of having just been immortalized in a painting; I simply acknowledge the fact that most oranges never get that chance. Most oranges are content to be eaten without being pictured; they are rarely seen by anybody apart from those who seek them out in the grocery store and take them home to slice them into pieces. Some oranges rot away in the store without being eaten. Only a very few pieces of fruit are left to swing freely onto their branches until they let go when the right time comes and they fall to a ground that seems to have been doing nothing but wait for them to fall and to embrace them when they do so.
Meret à l’orange— that’s the name of the painting. What an insipid title, I think to myself, ready to turn my back on painting—and fruit—forever. But then it strikes me: if there’s no gap between language and image, as the title suggests, I should be able to recall that orange in my mind at any time as nothing more than an orange—a thought so unexpectedly excitingthat it instantly rekindles my fledgling interest in both fruit and painting.
It’s a terribly hot day. The temperature is rising to 36 degrees Celsius and judging by the burning sensation in my face, the color of it must be closer to scarlet than ochre—a stinging kind of color I already know quite well from accidentally seeing myself in the mirror once after falling asleep in the sauna. I never eat bananas or apples, cherries or pears in the sauna, by the way; I eat oranges. And as I stand there in front of that brilliant orange, cool sweat running down my thighs, I reachinto my mind, take the orange from Meret’s hand, and set about peeling it.
There are many ways to peel an orange. I hadn’t given much thought to this seemingly simple fact until the day I stood face to face with the Genius and realized that my usual method of peeling an orange was fundamentally different from the one he instructed me to use. As I began peeling—slowly and carefully, keeping the peel intact in a single piece—I immediately knew I’d never peel an orange that way again. Of course, the exercise was meant to teach me something more profound, something having to do with the relationship between the three-dimensional world and its two-dimensional representations. If only I could recall exactly what it was, I would perhaps want to think about something other than oranges now.
Some of the oranges in the room I almost overlook. Those in the fruit basket on the bar desk next to the woman drinking something crimson from a glass, for instance — or those on the shelf above the bar. Instead, my eyes are drawn to a bright orange mark in the woman’s hair, where they linger until they find another, equally intriguing mark in the lower corner of a small canvas—a mark that too looks suspiciously like an orange. Even so, it takes me a while to properly notice it. Anaked, pregnant artist is posing close to the fruit, with a shawl tied around her head and chin. There’s something so striking in the way she meets my gaze that I can’t possibly look away. And despite the fact that she’s pointing directly at the mark with her brush, I initially miss the orange.
Most of the paintings and drawings contain neither oranges nor any other kind of fruit. To imagine that the perfect circle sitting in the upper right corner of a small painting—illuminating, with a warm and radiant light, the nocturnal encounter between a human-sized genital organ and a genital organ-sized masturbating woman—could be interpreted as anything other than a blood moon, for example, would be nothing more than self-delusion. Similarly, it would bee rather far-fetched to compare the erect and detached genitals that appear both here and there with the moist, wrinkled mushrooms that I sometimes encounter during my walks in the forest—especially since I don’t feel any particular desire to touch, let alone taste, the former.Not until I’ve seen it all—cherries, apples, pears, peppers, bananas, lemons, oranges; Not until I’ve seen the expected, the obvious, the equivocal, the well defined, the undefined, the difficult to define—do I see the eggs. They hang above the cherries, in the far back corner of the room. There are two of them. I can’t tell if they are raw or cooked, and so I leave the room with a question: crack or peel?