Six Scenes documents Mick Peter’s eponymously titled exhibition which took place at Halle au Blé, a 19th Century corn exchange in Alençon in October 2023, curated by Sophie Vinet (Les Bains-Douches). In Six Scenes we encounter the overlapping interiors and exteriors of a town square filled with both real, and fictionalised (or, we could say “any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental”) artworks, art dealers, collectors, dogs and shopkeepers. The book collects documentation of the installation from its sketchbook stage—a montage of postcards, architectural plans, snapshots, reading material, loosely rendered scenes, disregarded characters and technical marginalia—through to a high definition catalogue of images of the work in situ. A newly commissioned text on Peter’s work from Dan Fox accompanies this effort to narrate how an artwork comes to be made, and the artist’s caricature of the so-called marketplace it finds itself in. In his essay, Fox draws a parallel to the “Rich Guy Blue” character found on art fair circuits to his “eccentric cousin”, the ageing collector who haunts these Six Scenes—haunts the book itself—through Peter’s drawing, and redrawing, of the particular posture and expression he carries as he holds the price list for the exhibition-within-an-exhibition at the centre of the piece. The (fictional) commercial gallery “Galerie Fataliste” houses Mick Peter’s (real) series’ Tasteful Sculptures and Banana Works—also documented here— among its film-set style building made of ply, timber, and pasted frontages. The publication also gathers photographs of a series of maquettes, which on the one hand rehearse the life-world of the installation in miniature, and on the other, remind the reader of the commonplace, technical processes required of the artist in their studio. These candid scenes are framed by tools hung on the wall, rows of books, crates, scrawled notes on MDF desktops and unknown shapes clad in bubble wrap, ready to be shipped off, or otherwise protected from the dust of the next project. Later, we encounter the collector in his home accompanied by his new acquisitions, now rendered among the scenery of his wood-panelled lounge. He holds a glass of wine and looks out at the rest of the street, a local shopkeeper closes up for the day and goes to check out Peter’s new Wall Relief standing proudly in the cavernous architecture of Halle au Blé.
