The Shape of a Pocket

18 A Bed (for Christoph Hänsli)

On the hotel bed there is no body, nor on the bed beside it. In the English language the situation can be condensed into one word: no body becomes nobody. One cannot ask: Who is nobody? Or maybe one can ask (as the water pipes in the next room gurgle) but no answer will come.

Nobody is nobody and both beds are empty. There is not even a crease, a trace. There is nobody.

Nobody is your beloved or mine, and nobody is every couple who once occupied this room. Over the years they add up to thousands. They lay sleepless. They made love. They sprawled over the two beds pulled together. They pressed tight against one another in one twin bed. They went home next day or they never met again. They made money or lost it. They betrayed one another. They saved each other.

Nobody is here and the beds in all their anonymity are empty. Or I might say: full of absence, but this suggests a sentimentality, a regret, which your paintings do not allow.

Yet simply because we have lived, we cannot forget as we stand in front of your canvases — and they are life-size — we cannot forget, and you do not want us to forget, what beds promise. Beds promise more than any other man-made object. They promise like nature does when benign. Perhaps this is why beds are so hard to paint? Even in this one-star hotel with cheap synthetic sheets the beds promise like nature does.

The range of their promise is huge, from the modest to the voluptuous, from the timid to the ecstatic, from a pain’s small relief to the great pain of happiness, from a little rest to death.

No wonder that in hotel wardrobes there’s often a card to hang on the door handle, which says: DO NOT DISTURB.

And no wonder, Christoph, that you paint, whilst not changing anything, whilst following the example of Velazquez, that you paint these bedroom walls, papered or painted, as if they were infinite. Infinite like the sky or the sea? No. Not at all. Infinite like promise. Even a bed’s smallest promise partakes of infinity … Sleep.

Sleep. You are awake and painting, but we, lulled and half asleep, whisper unaccountably and recklessly to the absence: Come, my heart, I’m here, and we whisper this to nobody.

One of your canvases is about such a whisper. It’s of an unmade bed and a crumpled duvet. The infinite wall is behind. For centuries painted sheets and draperies have featured in European art. Danaë reclines upon them. The body of the dead Christ is laid out on them. They receive the marvellous body and are moulded by it. But here there are only the traces, only an absence.

I was here. And now I too have left. There is nobody.