Swirled together, 2023
oil on canvas
“Thirst” is a project that mixes personal experiences, visual and textual material from news portals, social media, mass media, and details of everyday life. Cut-out, recycled images from the crime scene intertwine with a finger dipped in still-sticky, drooling chewing gum, a rippling casino scoreboard, or a strobe-cut image. These and many other fragmented images lie on canvases together with fighting, or perhaps dancing figures? “In a crowd, the fool, the ignorant and the envious are freed from a sense of inferiority and powerlessness – it is replaced by the effect of brute force – temporary but powerful.” (Gustav Le Bon, “The Psychology of the Crowd”). The innate need to gather in groups, desires, illusions, the authority of the leader encourages to take extremes, unrelenting impulses take over. The multi-figure compositions pulsate with pungent, “chemical” colors that leave a blurred line between aggression and (dis)pleasure. The paintings are associated with dance and club culture. This is not too different from riots, gatherings in sports arenas or peaceful communities – a crowd of people, like one organism, affected by the same stimulus. The aspect of the ritual is also important, the desire to gather into ‘neo-tribes’, to break away from the routine, to experience unique, maybe even ecstatic states. Bright, large-format paintings allow me to affect the viewer physically. In a series of paintings, I try to create an intense, breathless atmosphere.
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