Fourth Wall Death Rattle / Eddie Peake

Spotlight on Eddie Peake exhibition at Tick Tack, Antwerp

At Tick Tack in Antwerp, Fourth Wall Death Rattle plunges us into a liminal realm where art flickers between presence and absence, life and death. Multidisciplinary British artist Eddie Peake constructs a universe where the viewer is never simply an observer but a participant entangled in a haunting maze, coiled like a snail shell, or confronted by a Minotaur rendered with unsettling smoothness. The exhibition blurs binaries—between desire and shame, intimacy and alienation, the real and the uncanny—crafting a visceral meditation on the fragile edges of identity. Here, transformation feels not only possible, but inevitable: a command, and a promise.

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.

Apotheosis

While much of the exhibition overwhelms with sound and vibrant hues, a silent pulse emerges in a series of works on paper. These paintings, made over torn pages from The Little Flowers of St. Francis of Assisi, are late additions but central to Peake’s evolving interest in printed matter and concrete poetry. Though each piece is discrete, they connect through a shared palette of blended gradients and the continuity of the book’s paper. The source text is not revered for its religious weight but for its personal resonance: it was a gift from Joseph, a Rwandan lodger from Peake’s youth, following a conversation about a shared fascination with St Francis. “It’s not that I’m not religious,” Peake notes, “I just find that type of codified religious language difficult to connect with.” Still, by painting over its pages, he reanimates the text. One of these pieces reappears in a hidden chamber below the snail shell structure. Its final visible word—ascend—becomes both title and invocation. “I like that it’s at the bottom of the space,” Peake reflects, “so it’s a kind of command—ascend. Not just physically, but spiritually, maybe to another dimension.”

An Orange-Peel Portrait of Daughter in Uterus

This final gesture finds an echo in the show’s only sculpture—perhaps its most tender moment. Cast in resin and held by a fine steel armature, Hitherto Unknown Love (2021) was born from a casual, intimate act: peeling an orange. Peake happened to be eating an orange one day at home while marveling at the printout given by the hospital of the first scan, where the facial form of the fetus was discernible. It was the first image he saw that induced in him a distinct feeling of the fetus as an individual human with a unique facial structure and personality. He began organizing the pieces of orange peel into the shape of the fetus’s profile and realized it needed to be a work. He loved the fragility of the natural, perishable material, which echoed the fragility of life in utero. It also felt like an unusual, surprising, and innovative take on portraiture—his particular way of manifesting love for this creature at its nascent stage of existence. At that moment, the twist of peel became real to him. Without intent, he had made a portrait. It is not a body in the traditional sense, yet it contained one—an image shaped by memory that captured the paradox of pregnancy: simultaneously visible and hidden, future and now. It is, like the exhibition itself, a space in between, unfolding in spirals, whispers and skin.

Fourth Wall Death Rattle / Eddie Peake

Credits
Artist: Eddie Peake / @eddie_peake
Exhibition Space: TikTak Antwerp / @ticktack.be
Words: Giulia Piceni / @giuliaapiceni
Editor: Maria Abramenko / @mariabramenko
Junior Editor: Annalisa Fabbrucci / @annalisa_fabbrucci

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