Magazine
An obsession writ large
The gigantic Dr Suzy Drossie, femme fatale and femme enorme. It is true that she is monumentally obese, that many of Onyango’s pictures are patently raunchy. But it is also undeniable that the paintings are good.
Posted Monday, August 3 2009 at 00:00
Magnifying this modern saga of sex, art and money was Onyango’s 1992 autobiography The Rise and Fall of Richard published by the Fondazione Mudima of Milan.
That was followed by a pamphlet, Richard Onyango, to accompany his exhibition in Venice the following year, and then came a comprehensive catalogue with the RaMoMA show.
Further exhibitions followed both here, in Switzerland and in Italy; acquisitions by major collections — including that of Jean Pigozzi; innumerable articles probably triggered by the old cliche that the whole world loves a lover, and now this fine little book published by the Kwani? Trust.
The raunch spills over from the paintings to the prose.
Here the trembling Onyango describes their first, ahem, night together:
“She acted like a lion. Her eyes were red and storming and she was sweating and breathing heavily. I think her blood pressure was very high.
“It was a terrifying thing. I had never seen anything like this. I was wet from her sweat but soon she cooled down and put on the fan.
“I found I was very sleepy. So we slept.
“In the morning I found all my clothes were torn. My trousers had no buttons left.”
Tremble he well might. The man is lucky to be alive.
I do wish though that someone — possibly the artist/author himself — could establish the proper spelling of the lady’s name. It’s such a basic thing to get right.
The RaMoMA catalogue has it as Souzy Drosie, the Milan book as Souzy Drosie Galian, the Venice pamphlet simply as Drosie and now in the Kwani? book, Suzy Drossie with the double ‘s’.
But whatever the spelling of Drossie’s name and no matter the repetition of old stories, this book remains great fun and a rattling good read.
.
