BEDROOM PAINTINGS
To crib from Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina principle: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”; all deep sleep is the same, but each bout of insomnia is maddening in its own way. Regardless of the source of exhaustion—physical labor, stress, menopause, hangover, sickness—once the wine dark seas of REM sleep roll in, the experience is uniform. Your brain and body are being repaired.
Insomnia has its own permutations, sleeplessness from physical pain, mental anguish, worry, that strange exhaustion that pulls sleep away like a Las Vegas magician pulls a tablecloth, all each have their own rhythms and patterns, their own “zone” at the edge of slumber where different epiphanies, riddles, memories, and nonsense intwine as a tapestry of experience, the blanket that swaddles us over the crater of real sleep.
In Bedroom Paintings, Joey Fauerso takes this universal yet individual experience of sleeplessness and elevates it into a stage, a salon, a window of routine, ritual, and incantation. Like the illuminated glass floor at the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, the surreal setting takes on a mythic charge. The paintings on the walls of the set, the pillows, and duvets mix personal and global history. The people range in age and appearance and yet are in rhythm—thrashing, shaking the pill bottles of sleep aid for relief, and finally dreaming. Mark Twain once said: “History never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme.” And this applies to the minutiae of our lives, an endless, restless rhyme that floats across waking, dreaming and the in-between.
Fauerso took inspiration from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s essay “The Crack Up” and its influence on French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Fitzgerald, writing in the 1930s in a period of alcoholism and failure, defines his own personal “crack up” as one both cataclysmic and clarifying. The crack up can be both ruin and rebirth. And so, when we are cracking up in the middle of the night, begging for sleep, we will often have the least and most consequential thoughts of our lives—moments of absolute idle nonsense (“does Joe Pesci still live in Santa Barbara?”), but also epiphany and revelation (what Deleuze calls “lines of flight”).
In Ingmar Bergman’s underrated psychological classic The Hour of the Wolf, Max Von Sydow plays a painter living on a small Swedish island who is plagued by insomnia and increasingly twisted visions. On the original British poster the tagline reads:
“The Hour Of The Wolf” is the hour between night and dawn. It is the hour when most people die, when sleep is deepest, when nightmares are most real. It is the hour when the sleepless are haunted by their deepest fear, when ghosts and demons are most powerful. “The Hour Of The Wolf” is also the hour when most children are born.
Bedroom Paintings exists in this slippery, elusive, endless hour. Witness its howl.
-Neil Fauerso
BEDROOM PAINTINGS, JOEY FAUERSO, DAVID SHELTON GALLERY, SEPTEMBER 6-OCTOBER 19, 2024