Ernesto Sarezale : One Rite And The Concrete Poem
Adam Nankervis

01/02/2006

City: Liverpool

BY HEART

Laying in a soiled bed,draped in a flag of the gothic eagle of Brandenburg in the interior belly of
MuseumMAN Liverpool,Ernesto Sarezale lay on his back,the flag with the blankets pulled up to his
chin as an audience stumbled and shuffled, dragging chairs and navigating obstacles to find Positions,crouched on the couch and on the floor space between toys,cabinets and the urios.Ernesto began the sigh of The Aftermath.
"He left something behind the morning after.I found it almost by chance"
A recitation of one his poems shifted between performance and act.Moving under the coiled sheets
he plucked invisibly at what he would find,"what now lay on the floor was his belly button".
The recitation at first is quiet,understated and familiar.The implausable absurdity,is conveyed with
Ernesto's metabolism of his own character and that of the event,and yet the framework,the mis-en-scene that permits his "dissapearance",paradoxically burns at the stage and allows a communion with the audience,in an engaging,humourous and an (un) identifiable day dream of the familiar.
And whats left for him now,raising naked to pluck at strewn cut out lines to recite,is an encounter with a man,who may never be seen again,in this,the belly button,a "thimble of pink flesh".

Where nudity has become the nullifying plumage of "performance",there is no sensation nor gratuity in Ernesto Sarezale's nakedness.It is worn as a cloak of familiar weariness It is the costume of the "spent man". Eugene Ionesco in the late fifties Paris is quoted,"There are no alternatives; if man is not tragic, he is ridiculous and painful, "comic" in fact, and by revealing his absurdity one can achieve a sort of tragedy." And an absurd tragedy it is.

At play with the cut and paste texts,the photo montage,the illusions of stains and stale perfumes,are a humurous yet weighted disdian bubbling from a bourgois morality and global political underpinnings-the legacy of moulded constructs,satires documented from the London Underground through the minute dash of a markers indignation spat at the wall like spent and tasteless gum.

The smudged inuendo from the caption writers of an IKEA catalogue,read randomly,become a blurb of Beefcake pulp. Sarezale concludes his performance of offerring his body,as a nights guestbook
.Red lipstick targets are drawn on his breast,arrows north and south on his cock,his torso,SOMETHING FOR EVERYBODY.

Subtitles for the one nighter rendered mute.