Flower Vendor, photography 34x20cm, X-ray photography

Freddy Durkee is watching the sun go down Warsaw

A residential courtyard. A few minutes after 7:00 pm.

A time often referred to as the "golden hour." The air is filled with one of those suffocating smells that tend to force their way into the nostrils. There is a crowd of people engaged in the scene around The Fountain.
One guy, a hood pulled over his head, is staring at you through a single squinting eye. On his right, there is a dog shitting. In the thick of the surrounding leaves, there is nothing else but a pulsating emptiness of green. Some old woman walks by holding a bouquet of black lilies in her hand. She carries them as though they were made of glass. She looks like she's about to cry. There is another guy who is crying. Another guy wearing a cap and a hood blowers cigarette smoke in his face. Another wears a suit with a head shaped like a potato with sunken eyes. There is a pair of teenaged twins glued to him, like two identical baby potatoes. There's a few more pairs. There's the pair sitting on the bench, who are also identical. The resemblance is uncanny, like copies of copies. One of the boys is like a skewed mirror image of the other. Both their eyes spin around in their individual orbits in this narcissistic embrace. Averse and reverse. Negative and positive. In the background, a figure filters in, with an enormous nose that has the texture and character of a rhino. He must not see them. And he doesn't want to. There are other pairs. Two boys sucked into one another, with gold piercings. One head with four ears, a single pair of eyes. A mirrored reflection of two guys immersed in one another, sucking each other's tongues. Or their penises. A man with his ears sticking out, literally beginning for someone to grab those ears. He is watching the sun set or even the moon rise. Melting against the fiery heat. The light illuminating the ass of a guy deftly pissing into the fountain. Another guy hangs over a hedge, although he might just as easily be hanging off a tree. Someone else is watching him from a distance. That one, at the very least, doesn't have a pair. He doesn't have a care in the world. No one is saying a thing. Or perhaps, as in the case of the avant garde art of the 1920s, the figures are simply performing what they are thinking, the very fact that they are thinking, when what they really want to say hangs above them like the sword of Damocles. It spreads across the air above them, thick enough to be sliced open. Everyone is swarming around the fountain, like planets around the sun. Their faces rub against each other like customers scrambling to shop a supermarket sale at Biedronka. The space around them is panting. Twisting and swelling. Fluids rise to the surface and tickle their trunks. Each combination is an imagined one. As in the fiction of Hłasko, their faces are strange, their heads vapid. And just like in Ferdydurke, a phantom invades sleep. 

The curtain drops. Darkness fills the scene. Ladies and gentlemen, this is only a collective hallucination. Please don't leave your seats. Now is the moment this tension will trickle out like sweat into a phosphorescent puddle.



***

If it were a film, the characters would be subject to interactions, a series of gags or chilling webs of conspiracy. Here we have nothing of the sort. Nothing is happening. The masks have become embedded into this hunk of meat that we call a head. If this exhibition was a book, the figures might be referred to as wooden. Harshly carved, built up of stereotypical shots, uncomplicated, so much so that they're transparent. If it were a photograph, we'd be fascinated by the pure sensibility that Branas applies to how the scene is framed. If this were a meal, surely it would be a pineapple salad. Nothing meshes with anything else, but the mayonnaise draws it all together in a single lump. It is just a spontaneous encounter by a fountain. Or, in other words, a ceremonial get-together at the urinal.
The heads rise like balloons: watermelons set atop marble trunks or cabbages stuck on a fence. It appears that we're looking at human heads, but that isn't the case. We are sitting inside them. Inside the head of the stupefied Freddy Durkee, who is compelled to contemplate everything around him, whether he wants to or not. We spin around in our chairs and pummel through the narrow tunnels of the imagination, as one flows into the next. We peek at the caricatures of doppelgangers and these Gombrowiczian mugs. They aren't so much people without character or characteristics, but as Musil would have them, they are characteristics without people, rather. A world in which experience fills the scene and in divesting itself from its actor, eternity dripping. Because if there is the impression of reality, then there must be an impression of eventuality. Because the world would be remarkable if events tapered away without making a mark that they had even taken place. This is what Gombrowicz wanted, there is no escape from a mug other than another mug. Every day we wake up within a thousand tight souls with a view of the red sun and a rising moon. The infantile and infernal rump. Leaves on the bushes trembling in the gentle breeze.
Help! O, these cursed parts! O these bloodthirsty, terrifying parts, and so you have snatched me up again, there is no escape from you, ha, I'll hide away somewhere, what shall I do, o enough, enough, enough. This is a story of parts and parcels. A ceremonial encounter of parts witnessing the sunset. Of course, only partially and in part.




text: Anna Batko


installation:light, luminescent powder, steam. Objects are made of paper mâché, shellac varnish, bay leaves, gold, silver, 26.08–18.09.2021,Leto Gallery,Warsaw, PL