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Robert Assaye
Robert Assaye is a writer and critic living in London.

Articles Available Online


Issy Wood, When You I Feel

Art Review

December 2017

Robert Assaye

Art Review

December 2017

At the centre of Issy Wood’s solo exhibition at Carlos/Ishikawa is a room-within-a room. The division of the gallery into two viewing spaces –...

Art

April 2017

'Learning from Athens'

Robert Assaye

Art

April 2017

The history of Documenta, a quinquennial contemporary art exhibition founded in the German city of Kassel in 1955, is...

She slides it into her mouth   She lets it grow heavy, take on warmth, breadth and shape, push against her palate, weigh upon her tongue   Immobile lips, minute internal contractions: her movements have grown less frenzied   She thinks of paper flowers that unfold when placed on water   She moves away, and contemplates the erect penis     *     Uniform sky, a dove-grey canvas stretched between the tower blocks; cars roll in an unbroken line across the horizon; at regular intervals, the varnished brown of a streetlight interrupts the alignment of the trees; cops glide by on bicycles, eyeing up the wedding boutiques: banal geometry which Jeanne matches with her steps, her breathing and her thoughts   She walks up the boulevard   But she changes direction, crosses, and the broken angle of her path is sharp enough to puncture the space like a nail that catches on a piece of fabric and tears along its length The city falls apart, loses its abscissas and ordinates, creating a maelstrom of sky, trees, streetlights, bicycles, dresses The sign on the corner of a pharmacy liquefies, flows down, mingles with the electoral posters, becomes sluggish, slips into the dead leaves, turns the tarmac over, swallows the clothes rails at Guerrisol and the iron shutters, consumes the pavement Jeanne sinks down   A dizzy spell, people assume, when she leans against a shop window – inhales, exhales – while the smooth coldness of the glass goes through her shirt and freezes her shoulder blades – inhales, exhales – while she closes her eyes and tilts her head backwards – inhales,   it’s always when she tilts her head back     *     Jeanne has drawn the curtains; the light, grown green, has filled the room like water   Jeanne listens to the noises of the hotel – lift moving up along its cables, doors slamming, groundswell of a vacuum cleaner It is nearly midday, the tourists have left to perform their role on the squares of Paris, their rooms are empty, the management is resuming its authority A trolley of miniature shampoos and towels approaches, slows down, but the room is protected by the card hanging from the door handle which

Contributor

August 2014

Robert Assaye

Contributor

August 2014

Robert Assaye is a writer and critic living in London.

New Communities

Art

January 2017

Robert Assaye

Art

January 2017

DeviantArt is the world’s ‘largest online community of artists and art-lovers’ and its thirteenth largest social network. Its forty million members contribute to a...
The Land Art of Julie Brook

Art

Issue No. 4

Robert Assaye

Art

Issue No. 4

Julie Brook works with the land. Over the past twenty years she has lived and worked in a succession of inhospitable locations, creating sculptures...

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Art

March 2013

Beyond the Mainstream and into the Digital

Vid Simoniti

Art

March 2013

Claire Bishop. Everywhere I go, some curator or artist wants to be rid of this turbulent critic.   In 2006...

feature

July 2011

Herat

Sam Duerden

feature

July 2011

At Kabul airport, a man I mistook for a foreigner.   A security guard, red-haired with blue eyes and...

fiction

March 2012

Swimming Home

Deborah Levy

fiction

March 2012

‘Each morning in every family, men, women and children, if they have nothing better to do, tell each other their...

 

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