ABSTRACT
In the nineteenth century the Germans painted their dream and the outcome was invariably vegetable. The French needed only to paint a vegetable and the result was already a dream. An artist has been working on a series of paintings called 'couples'. What she paints is still lifes: fruits and vegetables in beguiling, often provocative, interrelation. She does not restrict herself to high-brow fruits like apples and oranges, the familiar occupants of fruit bowls and cozy domestic interiors. The sixteenth-century Italian painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo produced grotesque combinations of fruits and vegetables arranged to look like human portraits. The innate surrealism of fruits and vegetables is here almost casually on display, especially when rendered with such technical fidelity, a realism that is almost hyperreal. The story of the search for an appropriate image for bisexuality illustrates both the problem, and some provisional solutions, for the larger question of erotic representation. The painting of the pears is sensual, though not human.
