In Season Five Everyone Dies
Wilhelm Saayman at Erdmann ContemporaryIn season five the whole cast, lured by the promise of incredible riches, boarded a plane and set off for an island where a madman hid his treasure centuries ago. The aircraft crashed, and the surviving passengers ended up eating one another until only one man was left: me.
Thank God my art supplies survived the crash. I spent the next forty years painting and painting and painting. Gradually, the memory of what other people looked like faded, but I still spent every day trying to depict the human form as best I could remember it. Under the harsh tropical sun dangling fruits with their lurid, over-saturated skins seemed more human to me with the passing of each year. I felt the teeth in my mouth and painted them, likewise my nose and aging body.
As my supplies dwindled only the most unsavory pinks, greens and oranges were left. And so my appearance and that of those whom I tried to recall was captured in a spectacularly luminous manner. I was resigned to my fate. I accepted the fact that I would die alone, there on that cursed island.
I was down to my last few tubes of paint when I was rescued one morning by a passing cruise ship and whisked back to civilization. My paintings were a source of great delight and consternation. Before long, I became a very wealthy artist, exhibiting around the world. What surprised me most was that I had painted people so accurately for so many decades while being all alone on that sliver of land. They really did have green, pink and yellow skins and their teeth were as skew as mine in their gaping mouths. They truly were bags of air filled with self-importance, greed and nonsensical opinions. They had invented pizza, deodorant and elevator music. They had managed to destroy a planet and many of the species they once lived with. They had not the smallest inkling of what would happen next, and neither did they care.
And as I lay my head down for the very last time I wondered, why had I spent all those years painting this human race? Why had I expended all that energy, day in and day out?
11 June - 29 June
