Penguin Cafe
The Imperfect Sea

1. In perfect balance: firmly planted in the sand.

The mirrored image of the penguin son, abandoned by the tides to its sandy penguin fate, looks neither forward — where the mirror reflects — nor backward — where it casts its shadow — but rather elsewhere.

Not forgetting his penguin nature, given to him unwittingly by someone who instead freely chose to be a penguin, Jeffes Jr., having now formed his own idea of the world, has shed the stifling plumage of a bird as much as he has understood that it is his own skin.

Refusing, however, to breathe the stale air of a café left unused for too long and to revive the playful orchestra of times past, today's penguin partly discards the naive joy and bold polyethnicity — fruits borne of a hallucinatory food intoxication — so characteristic of the penguin of yesterday. There's no choice but to accept it: the orchestra is irretrievably gone, but the grace of a muted chamber-music, that remains, as if time couldn't touch it.

2. In perfect balance: between centripetal and centrifugal force.

Last winter, even wearing his father's mask, the son distanced himself even further from the burden of managing the latter's debts. But not to evade them, rather — according to a paradoxical yearning — to find himself a penguin among penguins; to discover, like a good anthropologist, what the diaphanous Antarctica is truly like, which the penguins of old, finding themselves in the green fields of Sussex, never ceased to recall.

Here, however, the journey to the source of “Handfuls of Night” is yet to come. Mindful of the long shadow of the past, aware of the blinding reflection of the future, searching elsewhere for his imperfect sea, it is in the baroque transfigured by a fatamorgana effect, that the penguin son finds his intimate consonance with his father.

Having abandoned the acrobatic balancing between the popular and the exquisite, between the melancholic and the cheerful, today's penguin café is like a polished jewel. Observe it closely: what is most unadorned and humble, most familiar, that time has preserved from Simon Jeffes's imagination, is found, intact, held in the hands of his son Arthur.