RE: S.G.

Try to make Sophie Gogl laugh. Wait for a favorable moment and go up to her. Introduce yourself, in case you don't already know Sophie. Take advantage of Sophie's good mood, or contrast her sadness. Listen to her. Say something passionate, or something funny, or something clever, or something maximally idiotic, as the case may be.

Make Sophie Gogl laugh, and remember the feeling afterwards, when Sophie's gaze meets yours.

Then look at Sophie's paintings again.

Because here's the thing: light enters the eye, normally. With Sophie it's the other way around, and if you can get Sophie Gogl to look at you with joy, to size you up critically or smile at you, to be delighted or annoyed by you, proud of you, winking, then you may be able to imagine how Sophie's paintings feel: on the drive back from Boesner, in the van of Sophie's uncle.

In the studio, leaning against the wall, Margot Tenenbaum: Sophie is playing online chess. A novelist comes to visit Sophie and makes stupid suggestions for paintings. You think please don't, but Sophie would never anyway.

Leaning against the wall in the studio: Sophie smokes cigarettes. Sophie's decidedly political, theory-driven gallery, with its institutional ambitions and its program of installation-based conceptual work, owes her money. The novelist has even more dumb ideas; Sophie makes Nescafé.

Slowly you begin to worry. The exhibition is drawing closer and closer. The dumb novelist asks: Do you know yet what you're going to paint? Sophie plays online chess and sues her gallery. Suddenly, without anyone else having noticed:

Fanfares. Choirs of heaven.

You are placed on an easel. You see: Sophie Gogl, smiling. Sophie, focused, in her spotted Peak Performance tracksuit.

Sophie beams at you as you come into being. You turn pink and perverse.

You are — now — a painting by Sophie Gogl.

You will receive many compliments: for your big brown eyes, which you get from Sophie, your colors, your humor, your darling Tyrolean accent. You will — placed on the easel, leaning against the studio wall, with a view of a Paris Hilton tortoise — begin to paint, yourself.

You will draw an exploded cat, front and back, and let it dangle from a string, inspired by Sophie's jam-jar lids, inspired by Sophie's cat, Sophie's explosion, and the colored pencils Sophie bought you. You will be very inspired.

You will like living as a flattened Lindt bunny, with little flowers. Smiling into a mirror, while a serious egg, which is you yourself, stares back. You will no longer want to read any other way than jaggedly contorted in Sophie's dark-red phone-photo shadow.

You will divide density by references and receive a name — later, a new one from Sophie.

Thanks to Sophie Go-ógl, you will work as a shooting guard, or as Secretary-General, sgu godt.