Guano-Round

Judit Reigl, 1958-64

Alright. The title’s Guano-Round. Guano is bird shit. The stuff that piles up on islands, layer after layer. Now look at that big gray circle. All crusted over, with these little pits in it. Looks like it’s been sitting out in the weather for a thousand years. And down at the bottom, that little red drip running onto the white. Her name’s Judit Reigl. She’s in Hungary after the war, getting commissions to paint Stalin and the party bosses. She wants to get to Paris. They won’t give her a passport. Won’t even give her paint. So she tries to leave anyway. Eight attempts. Doesn’t make it. The ninth time, in 1950, she gets across the border. Then she’s walking, hitching rides, making her way across Europe to Paris. André Breton, the man running the Surrealists, likes her work. Gives her a show. She joins the group, but she doesn’t stay. She says later that she’d left one bloc so as not to belong to another. Anyway, she’s got these paintings that haven’t worked out. She’s given up on them, but she’s kept the canvases. Then she gets a new wooden floor in her studio and needs something to protect it. So those old paintings go down on the floor, this one included. And she keeps making other paintings. Paint lands on the canvases under her feet, soaks in, dries. She walks over them while she works. This goes on for years. She calls them “excremental rags.” Her words. All those layers building up like the bird shit. So that crust you’re looking at. That’s what happened under her feet. Eventually, she goes back to those canvases. The pictures she’d rejected have disappeared under all this paint. But now there’s something else she can work with. She takes a tool she’s made herself and starts scraping into it. Even the last coat of paint, usually white, goes on and then gets scraped right back off. Some stays behind over the older layers. So look at that circle again. Paint had been building up on this thing for years. And then she starts making a new picture by taking some of it away. She calls it “a backwards operation.”

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