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The Slaughterhouse

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Immaculately white walls. Before entering the other side, beyond the airlock, one must put on a white coat, helmet and shoe covers.

First, the smell. Then the mist that fills the space, making it impossible to distinguish the succession of vast cold rooms ahead. One allows oneself to be guided through them, almost blind, as through a labyrinth.

As the eye gradually adjusts to the thick fog, it catches a harsh light from the ceiling: white fluorescent tubes revealing, from room to room, hundreds of carcasses lined up, pressed close together and suspended from large metal hooks, swaying slowly at their ends. First, sections of carcasses — chilled bodies split in two, dripping broad stains of red blood and coagulated brown blood onto a yellow floor; then the shrouded bodies of young calves; carcasses without legs, heads or hides, eviscerated and stripped of their sinews.

At the end of this succession of pale yellow and white cold rooms, at the very back of the slaughterhouse, lies a vast space lit by a glass roof, like a painter’s studio, from which comes the powerful smell of burnt flesh. Here, the steam rising from the spraying of the suspended dead cows is denser, more opaque still, clinging to clothing as it does to the lens of a camera.

Unlike the silent rooms the visitor has just passed through, this space is filled with the deafening noise of machinery — pistons, cables and machines suspended by wires — operated by workers in white coats, helmets and boots.

Here, death at work. On the production line.

Cows suspended by one leg, their bodies still warm, their tails stiff and raised, while the lower parts of their limbs are cut away.

Cows with reddish-brown hides, stripped by a worker to reveal a second, white skin beneath. Another worker removes the soft, gelatinous parts of their bodies; while a third skins the heads and cuts away their dark-red, hanging tongues. He then severs the heads and lets them fall into a metal basket provided for the purpose, where, enormous and dripping, they stare back at you with round, bulging eyes stripped of their eyelids.

By the end of the slaughtering line, when the cow leaves this room to be suspended in one of the cold chambers, it will have been transformed into a carcass ready for wholesale, semi-wholesale and retail distribution.

As though, within the enclosed walls of the industrial slaughterhouse, unbeknownst to our modern society, the ancient sacrifice were being enacted once again — the ritual offering and immolation of animal flesh so that it may be consumed and shared by all.

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The Carcass as a Subject for Painting

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How can one paint the carcass after Rembrandt, Soutine and Bacon — or, more recently, after Philippe Cognée, whose paintings were likewise inspired by the industrial slaughterhouse?

After visiting several slaughterhouses, it was the extraordinary presence of the carcass — intimidating to anyone seeing it for the first time — that came to dominate and inspire my work on canvas:

How to convey the raw reality of this dead flesh;

how to make it more real than reality itself and, paradoxically, alive;

how to paint the strangeness of its form, which makes it an elusive object or image, evoking other objects, other possible images;

how, too, to convey the complex feelings it arouses — disgust, dread, intimidation, fear of death.

A vanitas, certainly: an object of meditation on death — “is everything nothing but a carcass?” — but also on our consumer society.

And also a pretext for a purely aesthetic exploration of red, imposing upon me a “Baroque” palette of reds, black, yellow and white.

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  «Et le ciel regardait la carcasse superbe

...

Les formes s’effaçaient et n’étaient plus qu’un rêve

Une ébauche lente à venir,

Sur la toile oubliée, et que l’artiste achève

Seulement par le souvenir.»

 

Baudelaire, «Une Charogne», Les Fleurs du mal.