“Core of Fuji,” David Onri Anderson
A banana already exists as something to you — it’s the basis of a pratfall, it’s phallic, it’s breakfast. The same goes for an egg — it’s a thing to throw at someone’s house, it’s a life-bearing vessel, it’s breakfast. And then, of course, there is the apple, a hieroglyph for love that appears in so many poems and songs. William Butler Yeats counted the passing of happy, love-filled days as “the silver apples of the moon, the golden apples of the sun.” In the Bible’s Song of Solomon, one lover begs another, “Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples.”
David Onri Anderson taps into these shared symbols to explore the vulnerability and holiness of fruit and eggs — and of ourselves — in Fragile as Fruit, his first solo exhibition at David Lusk Gallery. There are no myths to counter here, no clichés to avoid, because a whole constellation of references exists for apple cores, bananas and eggs, which are rendered here in graphic acrylic paint and flower-and-herb dyes on canvas. These symbols belong to all of us, and therefore can do what Robert Frost called “gathering metaphors,” allowing us to deepen some understanding of reality, whether it’s our relationship to food and nature’s energetic gifts, to our own suspension between life and death, or to some mythic power that resides within all things.
"Life After Life," David Onri Anderson
In a feat of characterization, each of these portraits captures its subject’s distinct personality and the suggestion of an interior life. After all, getting at the core of fruit requires destruction. You’ll never see what’s in an egg without shattering it.
Apples split like amoebas, converging and diverging within their winter-blue frames. They are calming in their symmetry and androgyny — bright-green centers are distinctly vaginal, but also contain seeds. Though we don’t know who’s done the chomping, there are bite marks that resonate in marbled waves deep into the apple’s crux.
As confidently introverted as the apples may be, the bananas are total extroverts, taking up space — their kinetic, blooming peels like appendages, their black spots a proud sign of age. They conjure movement and force in their composted dance, informing or responding to their sunset-colored environment, which unfolds behind them like a VHS dreamspace, with lines disappearing into the flat plane of a horizon.
Then there are the eggs — as fragile as fruit, powerless to outside forces and yet imbued with tremendous strength. Each egg’s portrait centers on the moment of the break, the snapshot of the reveal. And like the apples and bananas, the breaking creates a detritus that may be discarded. And what an exultant mess it is.
But as simple as the lifespan of a fruit or egg may be, it is sacred as well. In Fragile as Fruit’s most delightful piece, “The Banana Toothbrush Oracle,” a baby’s banana-shaped toothbrush — which Anderson stumbled upon and interpreted as a sign to continue making banana art — sheds black spots down upon a sock, a paintbrush, a leaf. It’s a necrotic blessing of the artist’s own cast-offs. And if trash, compost, peels and found material can have such an ancient power — and if we consume what can be found inside — then perhaps we, too, have this same ancient power to transform.
May eating your breakfast always be such a blessed act.
