- Year: 2017
- Medium: Acrylic on canvas, mounted on stretcher frame
- 50 × 70 cm
A golden, faceless young man stands tied and almost naked on a precarious path winding through a toxic, abyss-ridden hellscape. The body is naked except for underwear; the chains on his neck, hands, and feet anchor a visually translated shame into the rocky ground.
The composition addresses a field of tension between desire and threat, inner doubt and external condemnation. Cyclopean, phallic-looking morel growths function as double projection surfaces: they visualize foreign sexuality 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 – idolatrously exalted and at the same time a source of deep-seated insecurity within masculine sexuality. Condemnation explores the fear of being exposed to a public that reduces queer-read individuals to their sexuality. Bodiless, pointing fingers illustrate mechanisms of attribution, expectation, and control. The floating, omnipresent eyes illustrate a form of permanent visibility, fueled by lust, judgment, and social surveillance.
Self-perception is also negotiated: one's own desire, one's own flesh, one's own genitals. What constitute sexuality and body image in the mirror of others? The bondage serves as a metaphor for internalized power relations – for an alienated relationship to a body that is claimed by heteronormative social structures as well as by a phallocentric, over-sexualized gay culture. The work makes visible an experience of loss – an existential vulnerability in a world without reliable protection. It focuses on loneliness, projection, social harshness, and the fragile possibility of self-assertion.
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 external perception. The work, together with Connection and Contagion, forms a triptych – three states in the tension between closeness and distance, identity and dissolution, self-protection and contact.
