Encountering a New, Sinister Sound
This space between states, audience and performer, life and its after, is precisely where Peake situates his practice. “I’ve come to realise that it’s in that very pocket—between the viewer and who is viewed—that I want my work to exist,” he says, guiding visitors through the show. Drawing on the theatrical concept of the fourth wall, Peake inhabits its metaphorical collapse as both site and symbol. An atmosphere of intimacy and uncanniness hangs between the works and the bare gallery walls. This sense of in-betweenness intensified following the death of a close family member, when Peake and his siblings kept vigil, guided by a sister trained in palliative care. “At a certain point,” he recalls, “the person who was dying was making this sound I’d never heard before: the death rattle”. Like the fourth wall, it marked a threshold. For Peake, both phenomena symbolise unstable borders, those flickering seams where identity, presence and meaning begin to unravel.
A Pervert Soliloquy Inside a Snail Shell
Though at first glance it might appear to blend with the gallery’s walls, one architectural anomaly demands immediate attention inside Fourth Wall Death Rattle: a slender, vertical structure spanning three levels. Slakkenhuis (2025) means “snail shell.” From afar, the reference is unclear, but approaching the entrance reveals its secret. What looks like a pristine spatial form conceals an internal corridor coiling inward like a gut. As the viewer journeys through this solitary path, they become the protagonist, led into a heightened sense of claustrophobia, horror and cinematic tension. Within it, a sound installation comes alive—The Pervert Soliloquy (2025), born from Peake’s recent performance The Pervert (2025). The work explores the shame tied to desire, layered with autobiographical reflections, memories and fantasies. Buried in the basement’s repression, Peake’s recorded voice emerges monstrously distorted, near-inaudible, demanding patience and surrender to its sonic texture. Only by staying with it can one truly access the soliloquy’s content.
Seductive Yet Alien Smoothness on Canvas
Many works in the exhibition point toward each other, weaving a network of visual and thematic connections, but one painting of a Minotaur—inspired by a photograph taken by Peake in Athens—stands out as directly linked to the basement maze. Unlike his earlier mirror works, which forced viewers to confront their own reflection and flatness, Soliloquy of the Glabrous Outraged (2023) pulls viewers in with a strange, uncanny smoothness. Its gradients are glabrous and almost alien, evoking airbrushed imagery but crafted through slow, deliberate oil painting that gives the surface a vibrancy airbrushed works often lack. The Minotaur itself balances between extremes: it embodies the hyper-masculine gym body tied to traditional heterosexual ideals, yet carries a camp quality that complicates this reading, achieving an ambiguous sexual identity. The painting occupies a space neither strictly masculine nor openly queer, resisting easy classification.
