Charles Atlas
Films by Charles Atlas will be on view at Champ Lacombe in London from October 12 through December 12, 2026. Alongside the presentation at Champ Lacombe, film stills by Atlas will continue beyond the gallery into the city, across multiple billboards on view to the public.
Mayonnaise Number One (1973), will be shown alongside fourteen other of Atlas’ film works. The original film was conceived as the first of a planned series of filmic portraits after Édouard Manet, it restages The Boy with Cherries (1858) as a tableau vivant. The dancer Douglas Dunn sits before a burgundy velvet backdrop beside a sawhorse piled with red fruit. Atlas gave him a single rule: he could move as he pleased, so long as one elbow stayed on the sawhorse. Then he switched on the camera and left the room. His exit is visible just ten seconds in. Dunn begins with blinks, shifts of weight and what Atlas calls “face dance”, then abandons the rule altogether. He crushes the cherries under his body, or retreats beneath the sawhorse. Throughout, his gaze holds the lens, breaking the fourth wall insisting individual agency, not merely a subject. Encountered in passing, Douglas Dunn’s unwavering gaze meets the public directly, and the film’s intimacy, staged as a private moment, is offered back in to the city.
Billboard stills from:
Charles Atlas, featuring Douglas Dunn
Mayonnaise Number One, 1973, 16 mm film, silent, 11:08 Performer: Douglas Dunn
After The Boy with Cherries, 1858 by Édouard Manet
Billboard sites:
Castlehaven Road, Camden, London NW1 8RA
York Way / Freight Lane, Camden, London N1C 4BE
71 Mare Street, Hackney, London E8 4RG
79A Eastway, Hackney Wick, London E9 5JH
431 New Cross Road / Mornington Road, Lewisham, London SE14 6TD
199 New Cross Road, Lewisham, London SE14 5DH
1 Mepham Street, Waterloo Station Arches, Lambeth, London SE1 8FS
Vauxhall Cross / Harleyford Road, Lambeth, London SE11 5AX
13 Shepherd’s Bush Green, Hammersmith & Fulham, London W12 8PH
To learn more about the exhibition and billboards, please visit the Champ Lacombe website.