At The King’s Table: the Queen’s Habit (blancmangier), the queen, appears to be (perhaps) consuming her desserts/blancmange (though fleshly pink, it is literally white eats), while dressed in ‘deuil blanc’ (white mourning), a costume which in its own way consumes, and reforms her. She consumes as she is consumed, from and for, the table at which she finds herself.
…
In the series at the King’s Table, we see beings—caught inside historical, hegemonic, forms—required to perform a function. Being is inscribed by a social order, and becomes an animating organ of a sacrificial system.
In these experiments, each painted subject is revealed to be consumed by the custom/costume/convention, and the structure (and substance) of the image itself, to be ingested the viewer. While the subject may be seen as food for the system, this may be poison for the body as a whole.
Transversally, the artwork (if successful) may be conceived of as poison for a sacrificial system, but food/medicine for the mind-body which seeks freedom from it.
