No fears

When the abyss gazes back into you, it doesn’t mean that it was you who started it all – works by Irmina Rusicka and Kasper Lecnim at NO FEARS exhibition.

For certain, when contemplating this entire gazing-into-the-abyss business, Nietzsche was unconcerned with who began it. In this mutual voyeurism, the abyss might represent everything beyond the human being. The external – other people and intriguing times – becomes significant enough to be a major part of emerging art. This is how the Zeitgeist is captured, and this is how it becomes imprinted in things and people, conjuring new anxieties and new shapes they can take.

Oh, shapes. And, while speaking of them – bodies. Consider Spielberg's Jaws, where the sharks hunger to consume the city; or Hitchcock's The Birds, where the birds get a similar idea. Or Charles Burns' The Black Hole, with its enigmatic venereal disease disfiguring the neighborhood kids' bodies. These are true fantastic shapes. The allure lies in the fact that none can be reduced to a singular abyss or fear – it's not merely about AIDS, unruly nature, or raging capital. Here, something resembling a shark with its snapping, toothy maw does not necessarily have to be merely a shark. Fortunately.

In the NO FEARS exhibition, the abyss primarily manifests as bodies and body-like structures, charred to the bone, whimsically swollen, soggy, and barely casting a shadow. Yet, none of these are live flesh. There are no sharks, because the days of effectively frightening beachgoers with a shark have long passed. Today, when someone yells "shark" on the beach, a queue of onlookers will assemble. In an art gallery, at an exhibition with fear in the title, a similar queue may form: a queue of those eager to gaze once more into the abyss and its array of shapes.

***

Some shapes in this collection feel utterly familiar – like a forest, like a horse, like a feast. The usual backdrops, yards, and carpets are here too. Flesh-colored blobs and puffballs swelling right before our eyes – deeply recognizable to anyone in possession of a body. And yet, within this familiarity, something is off. Things are haunted by excess or by lack. Walls erupt in unnecessary ornamentation, aquatic weeds refuse to stay buried in the sand, a skeleton pokes insistently through wet pulp. Trees, rather than stretching with the wild ease of a forest, arrange themselves into an uneasy grating. What causes these strange distortions? What challenges bring their further growth? That remains unclear. But their origins are unmistakable, as is the outside world that lingers over them like a specter. And though they emerged from the most interesting of times, they are still no match for the true horrors of reality. If they were, they couldn’t be safely gathered into one space without risking a bite at the audience.

Were a German to see them, he might slap his thighs and say, "Ah! What a fine Zeitkörper from this Zeitgeist!"

(Nietzsche never said that, of course. And he didn’t strike as a thigh-slapper. But he might have been one.)

tekst: Aleksy Wójtowicz

Artists: Adam Kozicki, Kasper Lecnim, Marianna Rodziewicz, Irmina Rusicka, Julia Woronowicz.