THE STUNTMAN

At a certain point in his career, the artist D, perhaps because he could find no other way to make sense of his time and place in history, began to paint upside down. This is how I imagine it.

- RACHEL CUSK

At first sight the paintings looked as though they had been hung the wrong way round by mistake, but then the signature emblazoned in the bottom right-hand corner clearly heralded the advent of a new reality. His wife believed that with this development he had inadvertently expressed something disturbing about the female condition, and wondered if it might have repercussions in terms of his success, but the critical response to the upside-down paintings was enthusiastic, and D was showered with a fresh round of the awards and honors that people seemed disposed to offer him, almost no matter what he did.