Auction

And here we come to our final lot. Thirty six paintings by Kristof. Please, please, feel free to spread out. Look around. Not too closely. My little joke…anyway, a brief introduction is in order for our less knowledgeable investors here tonight.
Kristof, of course, needs no further introduction. These works are from his late period. He began painting shortly after his stroke. Over the course of several weeks, he built layer upon layer of acrylic paint, the other patients lugging his cracking canvas down the stairs from the attic in which he held his studio. Compared to an able-bodied man, his condition presented a host of mechanical challenges. Frequently he was wracked by tremors in his extremities, a legion of vicissitudes descending upon him, harpies and furies flitting inside his skull, making it incredibly difficult to apply the necessary twelve coats of paint required for his works. Each time Kristof opened a can, he and his fellow patients would hold their breath, hoping that nothing would visit the artist while he worked. “In the brief period when all oaths had been sworn and talismans crossed,” Kristof later wrote, “All factors controlled or hedged against, the decisive twelfth coat about to settle — all of a sudden, in the final seconds of my work as I reached into the recesses of the pot, a freezing mist descended upon my limbs with devilish glee — and what lamentations erupted throughout the hall as my brush, aware only of my body’s meagre efforts, slipped from my fingers and coated my leg in vaunted royal blue.”
Kristof’s paintings revealed a shadowy, shimmering world of protean and chaotic forms beneath forms. Some featured what at first glance appeared a single flat shade, before the eye settling on two sporting textures of tufted fur or buffed horn. Other images were even more abstract, pushing at total intelligibility, purples and browns interleaved into a spectral blur, bulges forming in the stretched canvas, always with a faint upward tilt as if in supplication. Due to the potency of the paint, some of which was originally formulated for coating metal bridges, each work left a very real mark upon the minds and lungs of the inhabitants of the sanitarium. Of course, modern investors need not fear any contamination, as any fumes have long since evaporated into the ruined eaves of the building.
Kristof produced thiry-six canvases during his time here, a singular and uncompromising collection. Several depicted an enormous cocoon from multiple angles; others took the form of extreme-close ups on cracked and veined surfaces that could have been riverbeds or hides. After their discovery by the nuns who operated this institute, who initially wished to cremate them with their maker, they were bought by a former patient, Jonathon Debats, for an undisclosed sum. Master Debats was an intensely private man, and for many years only his closest confidantes were allowed access to his private gallery. A few with an aesthetic lean wrote of Kristof’s works in awed tones. One referred to him as a conjurer, able to give life to his art far beyond the mere reach of daubed pigments. Others spoke that this life-feeling was not his own, that he had drawn the energies out of the poor waifs that surrounded him in order to fuel his craft. Needless to say, the low bubble of conversation throughout the decades attracted many strange figures into the orbit of Debats. Mystics and con-men, witches and bishops, all sought a glimpse of these thirty-six canvases placed throughout the attic.
A sludgy awakening was taking place in the inhabitants of that small town, rising from the swamps of ignorance: like animals on a scent, they wanted to track the to very source of Kristof’s inspiration, to grapple with whatever beast they found in the shadowed burrows of his decayed history.
Debats took ill quite suddenly, rapidly withering over the course of weeks. Perhaps he was poisoned by one of his many false friends. It is said he took the paintings to bed with him, keeping them propped in a loose horseshoe around his chamber. A few times at first, then more frequently as the end drew near, he invited far larger groups of guests to his ‘visaging’ parties than ever before, where they would huddled in the light of paper-shaded candles and drink in the scenes that seemed to shift and ripple over one another like wax, passing from painting to painting as naturally as a winding stream. Combined with the frankly unnatural appearance of the count, who had aged decades over the course of his illness into a broken old man, these parties, the paintings themselves, took on a ghoulish mantle, quite undeservedly in my view. Change is just change, neither pure nor profane. The body grows weak and dies while our art…but I digress.
Some visitors to the inner sanctum, those would had been carried along in the great crush of the crowd, propelled only by the potential to profit, surreptitiously attempted to leave with portions of the artworks, sensing a future business much in the manner of those at the crucifixion of Christ, the bloodstained scaffold he lay upon an infinitely divisible source of artifacts. The count was well aware of this despite his fever “I grow weary with these gannets,” the count reportedly said at one gathering, although he continued to hold them until the very eve of his death. As his adviser, I took the opportunity to secret away the artworks before the news escaped and a mob formed of puritans and thieves invaded the mansion. I do not regret keeping them to myself for so long: the paintings have rewarded me greatly for my fealty to them, showing me depths within themselves that could not be otherwise imagined…
For you see, Kristof and Debats are long dead, their ashes rising into the blackened firmament, and yet I see them and many others within those churning scenes, smiling or grimacing as they twist and shift in clouds of chromatic waste and carnal outgrowths. Do not look so shocked! Do you not find yourself unable to draw away from them even as they repulse you?
Please. Stay a while, as I shade the candles and draw the blinds across the shattered windows of this place, and you will see why I do not wish for an investment of anything as petty and sterile as coin. No, my dear lords and ladies, the bidding tonight shall take a decidedly different hue…