In Order of Appearance

OSL contemporary, February 28-May 9, 2020

The pale yellow tint of the cover of Collection Blanche by Marcel Proust’s publishing company Gallimard, is reminiscent of the colour of mayonnaise. Over time, the original pale yellow cover is transformed into a varied palette not dissimilar to the characteristics colour tone that occurs when egg yolks and oil are whipped together.

Just as paper yellows over time, it also takes time to whisk egg yolks and oil into mayonnaise. And when Roland Barthes used the mayonnaise metaphor about the literary principle that is the basis for In Search of Lost Time, he had a related organic process in mind.

Through the reference to how mayonnaise is made, Barthes in the essay It All Comes Together (Ça prendre) from 1979, alludes to how Proust in the first volume of In Search of Lost Time got the different ingredients he had been trying to bring together for a long time to emulsify. Barthes’ humorous expression from the world of gastronomy points out that the ingredients here finally “take”, forming and making up an organic whole, just like mayonnaise or like a novel. And this is how the author discovers his literary formula around 1909. When the ingredients were homogenised the next step in the process consisted of enriching the literary work, the way you can continue adding oil to the mayonnaise.

The colours of the monochrome picture surfaces in the painting series In order of Appearance not only allude to the yellowed paper’s affinity with the characteristic colour of mayonnaise. Oil and egg are central ingredients in the history of the development of painting. Yolks are used as an emulsifier for water and oil in fresco technique and tempera painting. Eventually, oil takes over as the main ingredient in oil painting as we know the medium today.

The graphic expression of the 61 paintings in the series In Order of Appearance mirrors the classical typography of the Collection Blanche, where the title of the novel is printed in red letters on the cover. In turn, each painting consists of five artist names painted in red on a single pale yellow monochrome background. The row of names, starting with Corot and ending with Chardin, consists of 303 entities in the same chronological order as they appear in the literary work.

The exhibition breaks up the literary approach of the text paintings with an historic painting by the french artist Pierre Mignard, an artist who is mentioned three times in In Search of Lost Time. This is Mignard’s self portrait from about 1660, a genre where the title of the work and the subject are one and the same. While the literary work uses the artist names as structural principles, the painting series, In Order of Appearance, brings the artist names back to the canvas as titles of novels, in red pastose oil paint.

In Order of Appearance
Pierre Mignard, Self Portrait 1655: In Order of Appearance

In Order of Appearance
Pierre Mignard, Self Portrait: In Order of Appearance


In Order of Appearance 


In Order of Appearance 


In Order of Appearance 


In Order of Appearance 


In Order of Appearance 


In Order of Appearance 


In Order of Appearance