Lars van Roosendaal / Verbreitung | Contagion

• 33 × 50 cm
  
• Acrylic on heavy watercolor paper
• 2019

Against glowing red lies a figure in cobalt blue: naked, young, defenseless. It is surrounded by a dense, almost overwhelming crowd of de-individualized bodies. Silhouettes and oversized hands—reaching or frozen in terror—frame the scene. The only figure lying down appears like a new arrival in a ceremonial circle: fresh meat, a strange source of energy, an object of desire.

What initially looks like an initiation—a symbolic admission into a socially ostracized community, yet one desired by the individual—reveals itself as a potential assault. The oversized beings stare spellbound—not out of empathy, but out of greed, fascination, and sexual hunger. It is a moment of charged ambivalence: between contact and loss of control, between attraction and threat, between connection and contagion.

Verbreitung / Contagion addresses the fear of losing control: of being consumed by a collective, of the unpredictability of sexual desire, of being at the mercy of others. The work touches on social themes such as HIV, sexualized power dynamics, and group behavior—but also intimate questions regarding purity, vulnerability, and the dialectic of touch, physical exchange, and danger.

The scene is ritually charged—a collective choreography in which boundaries blur: between voluntary surrender and structural overwhelming, between longing and projection, between reality and violation. The oversized hands represent both protection and appropriation—they symbolize power dynamics, collective guilt, and the unspoken, which nonetheless remains palpable. 

The image speaks of dissolution and dehumanization, but also of a deep longing for belonging—and the fear of dissolving within it. It confronts socially and individually shaped notions of purity and danger, intimacy and threat, body and collective. The expressive contrasts between cool blue and glowing red—a color representing blood, danger, and the dim light of darkrooms—as well as between light and darkness, intensify the emotional tension. The bodies remain intentionally blurred—shadow beings caught between reality and projection.

This work is part of a triptych, along with Verbindung / Connection and Verurteilung / Condemnation—three states in the field of tension between closeness and distance, identity and dissolution, self-protection and contact.