L6
oil on canvas, waterocolor, spray, 140x110cm, 2016
boxing glove
boxing glove, pins, 2016
“We can only look through the bars as the small and hairy evil plays with everyone else around
the carpet-beating rack, sticks a fuck-you up to God, has a collection of plastic guns, hands in its pockets.
Behind the bars lives the evil that is good and sweet, hangs around the legs, painting a fake moustache
on passers-by’s faces.”*
A balaclava, or just a mask. A colourful, nineties-y curtain. None of them is honest, but none of them is lying.
They impersonate the little prosecutor only to become his plaintive victim. They stab the pastel pearl
pin-heads,
so sweet and charming, into the hand you raise, not you, against the guilty, Arendtian, innocence.
Auch, it hurts.
A dualism. A disarming hypocrisy. They do not know what to do with their hands.
A contradiction and a gut-churning split. Subjectivism, idealism, autonomy. Freud used to call it
a polymorphous perversity.
Maybe it’s not about who they are, that there is someone inside, since they are only masks?
Not about what they hide, but, yes, about the very concealment?
Marcin Janusz’s exhibition is a sensual, harrowing bildungsroman of chav-sexuality, contradiction, contrasts
and discords, self-aggression and the condition of an individual facing up to his desires and, in fact,
still not knowing what he wants. Worse still, not even knowing what they don’t want. Here, a psychosomatic death drive and a shy, still fledgling self-destruction mixes with a rebellion and power conjured by its attributes, while a memory of a shameful decade and eclectic aesthetics of lameness mingles
with a homoerotic attraction and an essential split in subjectivity.
Ania Batko
*Dorota Masłowska, Paw królowej [The Queen’s Peacock]
documentation of the Icing on top exhibition, Księgarnia|Wystawa, Cracow, 2016, fot. Marcin Janusz
L2
oil on canvas, 120x100, 2015
L1
oil on canvas, 120x100, 2015
L3
oil on canvas, 120x100, 2016
