- Year: 2017
- Medium: Acrylic on canvas, mounted on stretcher frame
- 70 × 100 cm
A golden, faceless, young man stands bound and almost naked.
a fragile path that winds through a toxic, abyss-ridden landscape
A hellish landscape winds its way through the landscape. The body is naked except for underwear; the shackles
Anchoring a visually translated shame in the rocky terrain at the neck, hands, and feet
Floor.
The composition explores a tension between desire and threat,
inner doubt and outward condemnation. Cyclopean, phallic-looking
Morel plants act as double projection surfaces: They
visualize on the one hand foreign sexuality, on the other hand the perception of
one's own body. The oversized phallus is used as a symbol of power,
Desire and exclusion staged – idolized and simultaneously a source
deep-seated insecurity within masculine sexuality.
Condemnation examines the fear of being exposed to a public
to be someone who reduces queer people to their sexuality. Disembodied,
Pointing fingers illustrate mechanisms of attribution and expectation.
and control. The floating, omnipresent eyes illustrate a
A form of permanent visibility, fueled by desire, evaluation, and social factors.
Surveillance.
Self-perception is also negotiated: one's own desires, one's own
Flesh, one's own genitals. What constitute sexuality and body image in
Mirrors of others? The bondage serves as a metaphor for internalized [issues].
Power relations – for an alienated relationship to a body that is through
heteronormative social structures are claimed as much as by a
Phallocentric, hypersexualized gay culture.
The work makes visible an experience of being lost – an existential one.
Being at the mercy of a world without reliable shelter. It brings us closer.
Loneliness, projection, social harshness, and the fragile possibility of
Self-assertion is placed at the center of the presentation.
Condemnation is not understood as an expression of individual
weakness, but rather as a precise visual analysis of structural power relations –
between norm and deviation, self-image and external perception.
The work, together with connection and dissemination, forms
Contagion, a triptych – three states in the tension between proximity and
Distance, identity and dissolution, self-protection and contact.
