„The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.“ 

(Guy Debord, La Société du spectacle)

 

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For the first time, I decided to make my paintings a construct from the very outset. Although delivered as an imitation of a photograph, the scenes in question are not documentary (even if it was staged), but rather a complex scene created through digital manipulation and then transferred into the medium of painting. It is at the same time the falsification of reality, as well as its product.

 

The famous artworks by Koons, Minjun, Rubens or Vermeer serve as the backdrop, being a recognizable commonplace within culture. At the same time, it was not my goal to refer to the painting nor its author, but rather to point out the status of the painting as a marketing product, a spectacle reduced to a recognizable poster. And it is the main task of a spectacle to present to us, using various forms of mediation, the world we are no longer able to experience directly.

 

On the other hand, I appropriated the private photos of a snowboarder, a guy dressed as a stormtrooper or a couple of asian tourists taking a selfie somewhere in the vastness of the Internet. Their occurrence helped me to make visible the manner in which we experience and consume culture in the present-day, postindustrial era. The anesthetized observers are entirely alienated and not even attempting to experience the painting directly. They take part in the spectacle virtually, turning their backs to the artifact causing the affect. Much like in the archetypal Plato’s allegory of the cave, they are experiencing the painting indirectly, via the media image on the display of a mobile phone. Life has put an end to art, by becoming itself artificial, technologically reproductive, replaceable.