A wall-mounted, scarlet lightbox, reminiscent of the signage of off-licences, fish and chip shops and takeaway restaurants of the artist’s hometown, juts out of the gallery wall, setting a stage of sorts. Its branded panels have been removed and replaced with transparent ones through which used towels can be seen, slumped and squashed into a pile inside, shaped like a soft-serve ice cream or perhaps a turd. Two giant ants scale its folds. The towel motif has appeared previously in Myatt’s work, a liminal item, dirty yet used to clean and dry; dropped from waist to floor at the start of an erotic encounter or in accidental exposure; laid on beds before sex and on beaches against sand. Personal yet also communal, hotel towels used by thousands are in a constant state of regeneration: soiled, washed and presented as clean once more. Myatt recalls nostalgically the towels abandoned on his messy bedroom floor to be collected by his mother for laundry.

The language of nostalgia continues in Bloody Gannets (2024), perspex shelves lined with various carbonised pieces of food of the ‘picky bits’ or ‘beige food’ variety: curly fries, crinkle cut chips, filo pastry prawns, fish fingers, chicken nuggets. These foods felt reminiscent to Myatt of what his mother would serve her children after school, as well as the items put in the oven in the early hours after a night out and then forgotten about. In their charred state, the small treats become amorphous black remains and could be mistaken for ancient artefacts or animal waste. Abjection – and its proximity to humour –  is central to Myatt’s practice, in which images of sex, violence, decay and mundanity are compounded by irreverent, banana-peel humour to explore the fine lines between desire and revulsion, innocence and perversion, humour and absurdity. A lexicon of cartoonishly rendered motifs swirls and overlaps in two paintings and two works on paper. A squatting figure appears to defecate. A nude is surmounted by an outsized winged insect and a plated English breakfast. A bulbous rooster mounts a hen in an upper corner. In Twilight
Alley (2024), three thick black lines delineate the corner of a room or a stage with a painted background simulating infinity beyond its flatness. Traditional cel animation involves objects and characters being hand-drawn on clear celluloid sheets and placed over painted backgrounds, and Myatt’s sketchy offerings seem to similarly hover, unmoored and disproportioned, over washes of colour that are cartoonishly bright and call to mind the hues of the bodily: piss yellow, blood red, rotting green, bruised purple. 

Myatt is interested in the cartoon realm as one of suspended morality, in which extreme violence and hunter-prey power dynamics are hyperbolised into slapstick entertainment for children and, crucially, freed from consequence. The exhibition takes its title from the 1966 Looney Tunes short Shot and
Bothered, in which Wile E. Coyote notably falls off a cliff, gets hit by a truck, and blows himself up with dynamite in his relentless quest to catch Road Runner. Each time, the coyote bounces back unscathed, already hatching his next ill-fated plan as stars spin around his head. This Sysyphean absurdisty takes sculptural form in Grandad’s
Microwave (2024), an installation of Myatt’s great-grandfather’s microwave suspended from a rope and pulley system. It balances precariously, supported notably by a single ant, legs outstretched to support the appliance it is ludicrously dwarfed by. The shadow of the microwave falls on the ant as it strains against its own demise. Throughout the show, Myatt identifies cycles of transformation and regeneration – dead to vital, dirty to clean, frozen to charred, charming to obscene, funny to tragic, moral to immoral – and highlights the fine line that exists between them, the persistence, banality and, at times, absurdity of our mores, and how these are ultimately subjects to a constant interplay of pleasure, pain, fantasy and fallibility. 

DOMINIC MYATT (b. 1993, Leicester) is an artist living and working in London. His practice moves between drawing, painting, sculpture and photography, referencing autobiography, sexuality and the everyday in work that oscillates between humour and anxiety. He graduated from Goldsmiths in 2014 and The Royal Drawing School in 2019, and is currently a student at the Royal Academy Schools. 

Myatt’s work is held in the Tate Collection, The Royal Collection and the Soho House art collection. He has been the subject of solo presentations at Kupfer, London (2024) and the Tom of Finland Arts and Culture Festival, London (2022), and included in group exhibitions at Somers Gallery, London (2024); Emalin, London, curated by Queer Street Press (2024); Photobookcafe, London (2023); dARTs Space, London (2023); Ridley Road Project Space, London (2022); and Christie’s, London (2019) amongst others.

Batting eyelashes upon a life
P. ELDRIDGE

Turning from the world, a technicolour pulse, into something putrid,
you believe you’re living but in fact you are rotting.
You like this, breathing in the spores of mould, the damp of your home, hyperventilating, undetectable restlessness seeping into your muscles.
The first stage is a symptom of loneliness, paralysing you so the second stage, a dangerous one, can make its innocuous and lethal bite, injecting your skin with a sizzling disease: lethargy. Instead of walking you scuttle, that’s all, appearing to live through boredom and panic. You raise your hands, repeatedly flinging them up and down, expressing exuberance to a book, a song, a balloon, a painting. Though, to us we think, what is it you feel? Then a sudden shock: a voice in your mind repeatedly buoying you
to some surface, a hopeful dream guided by us, your friends, lovers,
a distant forager who left tracks before you to follow.

You live like this, guided—if only gently—by the strength of her flame. Ignition turning on, a tarantula eating her prey, something slippery because you can’t hold her, a sense of her own destiny divine, and you are rapt. If you could, just for a moment, take her pleasure in as your own; what would you taste?

The lights strike against her forehead; she’s here, again, for you to admire. Dancing, twirling, safe, but under stringent inspection.
You watch to understand but cannot adopt her movements,
and when she whispers, out toward you all, you breathlessly hope it is to you and you alone:

The day has come, I no longer feel obliged to risk that of myself I do not know by remaining tightly wound in my bud.

And so, she blooms in an electric state of transience that requires all effort to suffer, lose, endure and stumble from one defeat to defeat, a perfect state of static, a full progression of whirls and whines, condensation rising, chest falling, abnormal pleasures killing the taste for normal ones.

A SLASH CUTS THROUGH HER ABDOMEN
A GUTTURAL SCREAM
BLACKOUT

Light flashes across my eyes then goes dark. Before that, a burning stage, a curtain closing, followed by the sound of distant applause. I enter the uncontrollable void again. The cast surrounds me, I brush through them with my stomach covered in synthetic blood, heart pulsing through my chest, stretching skin and veins like a cartoon. Get the fuck out of my way, I scream, searching for some space, water, a room of one’s own.

Returning to the buzzing of the space, the unsightly world beyond the fantasy I have just come from, becoming again the epitome of an incomplete silence filled with feral people. The end of the world expands into a space of no set rules, no choreographic beginning or conclusion to guide me, and so I stumble. I peel down a hallway, hyperventilating. Someone stops me. Congratulations, they say. Seeing my face as it is, contorted and snarling through teeth that bubble with saliva, spluttering everywhere, they ask, are you okay? I groan something vitriolic that I cannot choke back, returning to the endless corridor, searching for my hovel. You have five minutes, they call after me.

I arrive at the door, mine, with my name plastered across its panelling. Open, slam shut, reach for towel, sit at mirror, light burning each iris, pain in chest, dizzy, tears lulling in the back of throat, across my cheeks, laughing now through something horrific, unnamed, always, where does sorrow begin and end, towel on lap covered in dark stains, wet still, disgusting corrosive texture, scrunched in both hands now, raised to face, smearing the me you see into the me I know, heavy breathing, can hear clambering beyond the door, time to go, ruined again because to look overstretched, outcast, oversimplified, tousled in a way, a canvas unfinished, would not be worth bothering about, and so a temporary pain can be drawn over the prolonged existential type of pain, less pretty and perfected, so it remains undesignated. A burst through the door, what have you done?
An unreasonable nod, what I want to do.
Pulled into a bathroom to be inspected, some familiar hands reapply the plastering to my skin. I understand their concerns in a thankless kind of way, knowing that I must act now not in the temporal palace of which all things exist, unwitnessed, but in the place where time is not my own but theirs. My hands lean into a basin where a spider sits sheltered in the funnel, slowly weaving a web and licking its pincers, and I wistfully wink at it as if to say:

I, here with you, bat eyelashes
upon a life chosen and a life received, and so together we will ride on,
our crotches raw and unsentimental, numb and thick.

After each mawkish moment of withdrawal I find myself within—the moments where people are projecting something of themselves onto you—I scream. Everyone dissipates from my vicinity, time is ticking, I’m given a moment to breathe in loneliness that feels sweeter than any touch. An inaudible droning noise punctures my ears. My bones contort into a hollowed out exhale, a huff, and just as I look beyond myself with genuine satisfaction, I reach for my satin gloves. Upon slinking them onto my skin, latching at each finger, a nail breaks and blood spills through the fabric. Here I am, the synthetic, sticky reality of being a person, maybe something other, and so discernibly, perhaps only to me, as fragile as they come.

A stench greets me as I return to the hallway, splashed in sporadic darkness now with the strobing of a frenetic neon light beckoning me back to stage. I peel off into the kitchen. My nose and eyes find confluence: on the table, calcified shrimp cocktails and oxidised, iridescent and black mould- battered onion rings. There’s a lurch in my stomach, the smell itself is not enough to make me puke, but an idea, something horrid, comes into focus. Both hands, steadying over the objects, snatch and crunch and slosh and claw, pulling them from their miasma of despair into my mouth, covering lips, the turned amber and gelatinous substance of mayonnaise oozing down my neck, smeared over my décolletage. Such things, neither are, nor can be, nor have been so utterly statuesque as I feel in the grotesque. A hunk of death slips through my dress and catches at my navel, slowly slimming me, and as I round the corner, contorting my body into various shapes–poisoned and in agony, attempting to keep the food down–I think of how people, when they view a falsehood in nature, are so readily able to approve rather than condemn. To disregard that there are seismic shifts happening, so beyond our own control internally, considering something real or not by observation alone, is a shameful falsehood. And so, I decide to welcome the grotesque in as it establishes a material for new hierarchies to emerge. My stomach gurgles as it creates room for mould to lichen itself to my intestines, through the lining and into passageways I’ll never see. The teeth-desiccated shrimp leaps up my chest with reflux, so painful, that when I swallow, my saliva becomes instantly acidic.

I slither myself away, time my enemy, a visionary millipede; scary and ugly, alien and yet so distinctly of the earth. A bright yellow, lilac, and red splatter my vision as I step into the centre. Hot lights beam down upon me, melting me with their precise focus. My forehead builds bulbs of sweat and I hear a radio crackling from stage left. Someone responds, she’s ready... finally. Some people suspect the maliciousness of another to be purely centralised around the behavioural irritants of, so to speak, you; but, as wisdom with age reminds me, the melancholy of anyone’s unease is a starkly lit candle placed below a thread. Burning it, and maybe before it snaps, they realise, it is not the shape or form of you that creates such disdain but their own.

Up in the lighting rig, a naked man hangs from the ceiling. No one can see him, idly bobbing and gyrating, hair tussling with the dusty breeze of an air conditioner vent a few metres away. He waves at me, covered in eczema sores, as he pulls a light away from the audience to beam into my vision. I blink, looking down and up again, and he is gone. I go psychotic, nostalgic for some sense of clarity between the space of performed stability and quiet personal proclivities. My hands are clammy as I hit my mark and the curtain is pulled back. An audience rises to their feet, rewarding me with their gratitude, and the co-star beside me takes my hand, leading me into a bow. At the intersection of our hands, we grease into each other. His rough textured skin becomes mine and forever we idle here, inescapable from this moment, beyond my own putridity when alone, ultimately succumbing to the feeling that:

All we will ever be is how we are found under the spotlight.