"During the recent lockdown Laura Gascoigne invited me to take part in Revisiting The Decameron, an online exhibition she was curating about contemporary artists' responses to Boccaccio's classic. I was not without misgivings. The Decameron comprises a hundred stories told by ten fictitious Florentines while self-isolating during the Black Death of 1348. My difficulty was that many of these stories are extremely bawdy. Although I've never been averse to humour in my work, I have tended to shy away from anything too earthy. But my fears proved unfounded. Not only did I find that I rather enjoyed painting about illicit trysts and naked lovers surreptitiously leaping out from bedroom windows but the stories generated an endless stream of ideas, so that I ended up producing over thirty paintings during a two-month period. Given a few more months I could easily have produced seventy more paintings to match the hundred tales." - Jiro Osuga