From one of the most lauded artists of his generation comes a purging
soliloquy: a profound nowt delivered in some spent afterwards. Scorched
by senility and nostalgia, and wracked by all kinds of hunger, Ed
Atkins' Old Food lurches from allegory to listicle, from lyric to
menu, fetching up a plummeting, idiomatic and crabbed tableau from the
cannibalised remains of each form in turn. Written in conjunction with
Atkins' exhibition of the same name, Old Food is a hard Brexit, wadded
with historicity, melancholy and a bravura kind of stupidity.
Ed Atkins is an artist who makes all kinds of convolutions of
self-portraiture. He writes uncomfortably intimate, debunked prophesies;
paints travesties; and makes realistic computer generated videos that
often feature figures that resemble the artist in the throes of
unaccountable psychical crises. Atkins' artificial realism, whether
written or animated, pastiches romanticism to get rendered down to a
sentimental blubber - all the better to model those bleak feelings often
so inexpressible in real life.