Michaela Schweighofer: I want to start with the title of your show, which is also the title of the book: What does an oracle look like? In the book, you write:
The word ‘oracle’ is shrouded in mystery: it can refer to both the person who divines, the site of divination, and the message received. And there’s no single divination process: glistening animal entrails, rustling oak leaves, amphora-spilled wine – these are all examples of oracular material, to be interpreted in the right way.
‘What does an oracle look like?’ is a misdirected question; confusing vision with sound, description with interpretation. With its focus on appearance, it becomes a painter’s question. It’s not important what oracles look like, after all – it’s what they say.
When you say that ‘What does an oracle look like?’ is a painter’s question, what do you mean?
Perri MacKenzie: The question first came to me when I was making the drawing Illustration Fantasy. It’s my idea of what it might be like to be an illustrator of crime novels. And the novels in the drawing are real novels: detective fiction set in ancient Rome by the author Lindsey Davis. I was trying to imagine what it would feel like to be the person illustrating these covers, so I made this desk drawing where you see the hand of the illustrator and all of their mess. Amongst all of these classical references, it struck me that I needed to know what an oracle looked like, so that I could draw it. ‘What does an oracle look like?’ was quite literally an illustration question. But I couldn’t picture it.
Then I realised: of course, the role of oracles in myth is that they have a fateful message which drives a tragic plot. Therefore, to ask yourself what oracles look like is beside the point, as it’s about what they say. The question begins in illustration, in the visual realm, and ends in speech, in the sonic realm. And linking these two realms is the project of the book and the show.
MS: Potentially, the painting process could be seen as questioning an oracle. Sometimes you don’t know what a painting will look like in the end. The process of painting could also be seen as the reading of an oracle or divining something that you’re trying to convey to the outside world.
PM: Absolutely. You’re trying to receive a message. Painting, like oracle divination, is about looking at something and forcing the contours of that into meaning. For me, this moment of interpretation is magical. It’s part of what it means to live in the world.
MS: What do you mean by that?
PM: As human beings, we’re addicted to meaning-making. That’s why we have stories, figurative art, and politics. With drawing – looking at a pile of stuff and creating meaning out of it visually – you realise that not everything has meaning. There is an equal balance of meaning and meaninglessness in the world around us.
MS: Maybe here, there is a circular motion back to the detective novel. When I think of the work we do as artists, I always imagine it being similar to that of a detective, as both draw meaning from seemingly meaningless things around them. Both are solving a problem, a puzzle, or a mystery. So I found it quite fitting that you used the idea of the illustrator of a detective novel in your book.
Reading the book, I feel that it is very much about the interconnectedness of all things, the everyday and the sublime, as well as all the personas we inhabit – true and imagined. There’s Perri, the artist; Perri, the writer; Perri, the imagined illustrator of book covers; Perri, the pottery enthusiast. The text flows into the drawings and vice versa. Can you tell us more about this method, or as you call it, your ‘graphical way of thinking’?
PM: The book began as a place to put text and image together: I wanted to see how they would inform each other. Through the process of making the book together with the artist Ilke Gers, who came up with the design concept, I started to see the interconnection.
MS: So, how does your writing relate to your drawings?
PM: I have a highly edited way of writing. I draft endlessly and boil down the prose, I try to make it very muscular. Everything has to have a push and a contour. I think a lot about the shape of my sentences… so my writing style is very visual.
MS: Would you say that the texts’ content reflects your ‘graphical way of thinking’?
PM: Yes, I would. A lot of the texts in the book refer to images that arrive through writing. For example, one text is about the word ‘figuration’, reflecting on the mental images that are conjured by this word. It’s about the shape of a phrase, the shape of a letter, the shape of a syllable.
MS: It’s also about graphic storytelling. I was touched by the mini-comic that is an insert in your book: a woman (who resembles you) cycles through a rainy Brussels night to a bio-coop looking for wine. There, the wine is presented by – may I add – a beautiful masked man. The wine label reads astral amphora. When she leaves the shop, she looks up at the stars. The reader sees how everything is connected. It becomes a mini-zine within the zine, a drawing within a bigger drawing.
PM: When I made the book, I wanted to mix together a variety of references because that’s also how I experience life.
Brussels is a city of bandes dessinées – a rich comic and illustration culture. The comic I made, titled The New Age, is my homage to this tradition. It’s my Brussels noir. It has a darkness, high contrast, puddles, and a Raymond Chandler-esque protagonist. I’m attracted to noir–style detective fiction because of its theatrical quality and hard-boiled language, which is vivid and highly contoured. This stylisation means that the protagonist graphically integrates into their surroundings. A shaft of sunlight is given the same attention as the angle of a hat.
MS: What’s the story behind the sexy night sky, which forms the climax of The New Age?
PM: I wrote this comic during COVID, when I was spending a lot of time on my own. I remember going to the counter at the bio store, and the cashier had these expressive eyes. The masking and the isolation made everything so heightened, right? I started thinking that the erotic charge is a sparkling field throughout everything. In my comic, the protagonist looks into the night sky and sees an orgy of constellations.
MS: That is what Audre Lorde writes, right? She writes about the erotic being in the things we do as painters or sculptors, or writers. It’s the erotic quality of seeing the world, illustrating the world, writing about the world, and sculpting the world. This is where the erotic lies for her. Another theme in your book is the classical world, in particular ceramic amphorae. Why did you choose to research this world?
PM: I was struck by the fact that these decorated pots are an almost-perfectly preserved record of paintings in the ancient world, due to their intense firing process. Looking at them, we can imagine lost mural paintings.
When you look closely at these pots, they tell a graphical story. There was a transition point around 500 BCE where their colours suddenly inverted: from black figures on a red ground to red figures on a black ground. This black-red inversion triggered a technical revolution, as artisans switched from a scratchy stylus to a wet brush. Amphorae tell a story of technology and commerce – but also a graphical story, a story of black and red.
MS: Is the colour of the book cover informed by the colour of the amphorae?
PM: Yeah, it’s a dark orange, like terracotta. On the inside covers, there’s a large drawing of two men chasing each other. They are from a wine jug from the 5th century BCE. For me, the two figures running from orange cover to orange cover turns the whole book into an amphora – and into a space of desire.
MS: You intend the exhibition to be a ‘theatrical extension’ of the book. When you enter Komplot, there seems to be a clear division between a ‘front stage’ and a ‘back stage’. We enter the gallery through collage paintings on paper hanging from the ceiling. One could also call them ‘backdrops’ of the front stage. And through an archway in the space, we enter another the back stage: a more intimate setting, which you call the ‘Reading Room’. Can you talk about this division to divide the two spaces? And how the names relate to what you’re showing?
PM: The Komplot space is very long, it’s naturally divided into two via an archway in the middle. As I work with a variety of media, it’s important to present the works in a way that the show is not confusing for the viewer.
The front space is called ‘Speaking Room’. There’s seven collage paintings on paper, hung from the ceiling with fishing wire. Like you say, a backdrop, a theatrical installation of paintings. They feature the gothic animal fountains at Place Sainte-Catherine here in Brussels.
MS: What drew you to these fountains?
PM: I’ve been painting them for quite some time … each of the animals has a different kind of jet of water gushing from its mouth. I noticed that each animal had its own personality. Painting a fountain became a way to paint a voice. Again, it’s an illustration question: what does a voice look like?
MS: And then, as you walk into the back space, which you call the ‘Reading Room’, you see a series of screen prints, titled Oracle. Can you tell me more about these?
PM: They’re part of an experimental print project in which I constantly change the color and transparency of the ink, as well as the motifs on the silkscreen. Each print is different because there’s a different combination of layers. They’re abstract, they have these sign-like marks and swirling vortexes that fight against each other.
I hung these prints together with some ink drawings, which all have a figurative or written component. For me, the provocation was that you can ‘read’ these abstract screenprints as much as you can ‘read’ the figurative drawings. They’re all hung in a line that flows around the space. And to me, that’s the provocation of the book. You can ‘read’ anything. You decide where to draw the meaning.
MS: Yes, it’s true. I think the phrase you use is ‘unbroken legibility’, which is a very beautiful term to describe the reading of abstract paintings or drawings: they are readable and understandable, just on a different level. The figurative drawings are like a graphical interpretation of what can be read.
PM: Absolutely. As an artist, I want to claim both ways of working, figurative and abstract. One thing that links the two is that they’re both immersive. That’s why the publication is a large format with double-page spreads; that’s why there is a wall painting depicting a giant book. The viewer is the figure in this immersive world.
MS: Can you tell me more about the wall painting?
PM: It’s a floppy open book, nestled in the corner. I wanted to create a salon where you could read the book quietly. For me, an open book, a double-page spread, is a sensual space. You can lose yourself in it.
MS: Yes, there is an immersive quality. With the depiction of the hand and the desk in the drawing Illustration Fantasy, it’s very much that we can see what you see, right? The viewer and the painter become one.
PS: Absolutely. But it’s also not quite one-to-one because it is a fantasy. It’s a performance!
MS: As with many things in life, it is always a combination of the true and the imagined, right? I have the feeling that all parts come together in the show as well as in the book. It’s an endless feedback loop, feeding itself: the books you read feed the texts you write and the drawings you make; the fountains you encounter feed the paintings you paint and the content you consume. Theory, stories, detective fiction, graphic novels, linguistics, ancient amphorae, fountains, the act of buying food at your bio-coop – every single thing becomes part of your life as an artist. All these references and communities: you fall into them, and they feed back into your work. The little things that seem meaningless to others become meaningful in the process of making art.
Address and contact:
Komplot
Pl. du Conseil 4, 1070 Brussel
www.kmplt.org
Perri MacKenzie (*1986) is a Scottish painter and writer based in Brussels. Presentations of her paintings include Autofiction at Galerie Fons Welters, Amsterdam; Look! Lightning has struck the flowers at Sunday, London; and Noise! Frans Hals Otherwise at the Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem. Her essays and art criticism have been published in Glean, Le Chauffage, and The Serving Library. In 2023 she was a resident at Frans Masereel Centrum. What does an oracle look like? is her first book, published by Leaky Press (2025). www.perrimackenzie.info
Michaela Schweighofer is an artist and writer from Austria, based in Brussels and Vienna. www.instagram.com/miggigram/