Lars van Roosendaal / Verurteilung | Condemnation

• Medium: Acrylic on canvas, mounted on stretcher frame
• 70 × 100 cm
• 2017

A golden, faceless young man stands bound and almost bare on a brittle path winding through a toxic hell-landscape shot through with chasms. The body is naked but for a pair of briefs; the bonds at his neck, hands and feet anchor a visually translated shame in the rocky ground.
The composition explores a field of tension between desire and threat, inner doubt and outward condemnation. Cyclopean, phallic-looking morel growths act as double projection surfaces: they visualise the sexuality of others on the one hand, and the perception of one’s own body on the other. The oversized phallus is staged as a symbol of power, desire and exclusion – idolised and at the same time a source of deep-seated insecurity within masculine sexuality.
Verurteilung / Condemnation examines the fear of being exposed to a public that reduces queer-read people to their sexuality. Bodiless, pointing fingers illustrate mechanisms of attribution, expectation and control. The floating, omnipresent eyes make visible a form of permanent visibility, fed by desire, judgement and social surveillance.

Self-perception is negotiated here too: one’s own desire, one’s own flesh, one’s own genitals. What constitutes sexuality and body image in the mirror of others? The bondage serves as a metaphor for internalised relations of violence – for an alienated relationship to a body claimed by heteronormative social structures as much as by a phallocentric, oversexualised gay culture.
The work makes an experience of lostness visible – an existential exposure in a world without any reliable place of safety. It puts loneliness, projection, social harshness and the fragile possibility of self-assertion at the centre of the picture.

Verurteilung / Condemnation is not to be understood as an expression of individual weakness, but as a precise visual analysis of structural power relations – between norm and deviation, self-image and outside perception.
Together with Verbindung / Connection and Verbreitung / Contagion the work forms a triptych – three states in the field of tension between closeness and distance, identity and dissolution, self-protection and contact.