Marton Perlaki's Irregular Patterns

The photographs of Marton Perlaki are driven by his conviction that ‘despite all differences, there’s an underlying interconnectivity between things’. For Frieze Week, Perlaki made a selection of unseen images taken in London, paired with a poem by George Szirtes, to explore ‘irregular patterns, connections or unexpected narratives’ in the city’s mesh of voices and stories.

ÉSPRIT DE L’ESCALIER

Suddenly there we all were, talking together

but not to each other. It might have been I

who had started it, muttering as I do

to myself, or rather to a figure to whom

I have something to say in the manner known

as l’esprit de l’escalier, that ghostly meeting

on the staircase with a person already past meeting

for whom we now have an altogether

brilliant answer, one we have always known

but had failed to produce when required.And now, I

and the others were talking, all of us, to whom

it would finally concern us to talk to, as we do

each day on the bus, knowing just what to do

and to say at this and every other such meeting.

There were friends, fears, ghosts, and past selves whom

each of us had to answer, all of us speaking together

every which one a distinct and separate I

in a world where everything has always been known.

The air was packed solid with voices we had once known

or were ours, it was hard to tell which, for how do

you tell the inner from the outer, or distinguish the I

from the not-quite-I? And soon each intimate meeting

had spilled onto the street, all voices singing together

to make one thundering chorus, each who with its whom,

in doorways, on staircases, singing to whom-

soever could hear and respond to the known-or-unknown

harmonies we were producing as if we were together.

We were ghosts. We were dead. There was little to do

but to listen and sing and be dead and be meeting

each ghost on its staircase. And so it was I

myself spoke to the dead ones within me since I

was their only voice, the lost hum of their whom.

It was crazy this sound, the music of meeting

all of them now, there on the bus, having known

only the steps to the top deck, knowing what to do

only in emergencies when we’re all thrown together

and have to make do as we are, no matter with whom

we travel or have known, these voices with their I,

their you, their singing together at each and every meeting.

<sub>Text by George Szirtes. Courtesy: Bloodaxe Books

Main image: Marton Perlaki, View of the Financial District, 2018.Courtesy: the artist 

Thumbnail: Marton Perlaki, Untitled (In the Financial District), 2015. Courtesy: the artist</sub>