19.09.-13.10.2008.




Marta Lisok
What happened at Lancaster House?

“The Garden of Earthly Delights”, a triptych by Hieronymus Bosch reveals an unknown land where animals coexist in a paradise symbiosis giving themselves up to refined caresses in a ritual dance. The process of reaching full experience illustrated there takes place exactly during the orgy, seen as the situation of transgressing all norms and prohibitions. To this element of transgression refers Rafał Zur, who in his new cycle scratches the wounds that had already healed up in order to bring himself together from afresh. Zur deconstructs images that keep haunting him into primal elements, juggling with a set of symbols according to the rules he knows alone. The transgressional atmosphere of those scenes, violating the taboo and going beyond good taste, takes the viewer aback. Small sizes of works, bright colours and contemplative composition reveal after a while an abundance of disgusting details. His works have a similar impact to the frames from the movie “Irréversible” by Gaspar Noe, characteristic for the detailed scenes of brutal murder taking place at the gay club ‘Rectum’, in which a man commits a crime of passion and crushes another man’s skull with a fire-extinguisher. These atrocities make the observer close his/her eyes and yet, at the same time, look at them with curiosity between his/her fingers, from under his/her eyelids half-closed with disgust, while balancing on a pleasingly moss-grown, though slippery foot-bridge cast between shame and ecstasy.

Characters from Rafał Zur’s paintings are far from common ideas concerning little plush cartoon animals, for instance Disney’s Bambi with shiny melancholic eyes. They turn out to be insatiable beasts, obsessively penetrating the areas of their own sexuality. A roe deer has its head cut off and its organs taken for a section like in an academic coursebook. It is wrapped up in a nylon bag, plugged into rubbery fire hoses, raped and finally, made a saint by casting light on it, being situated in a candelabrum and altar-like, symmetrical configuration of other animals surrounding it like satelites. Zur’s art evolves, from pictures being an echo of Lech Kołodziejczyk’s shimmering painting, through cool, pastel pictures in which leafless trunks of trees, rickety spruces, sputniks and flying saucers, medical stuff: hooks, pincers, drips, pills and artificial limbs are becoming modules used repeatedly in a variety of configurations. Taken out of consulting rooms, this metal equipment associated explicitely with fear of pain suffered during a medical surgery, is pervertly balanced by the scenes of outbursts of animal sexuality and is turned into a set of peculiar fetishes. The artist’s latest cycle ‘Lancaster House’ tells grasping stories, unprudishly defining the elements just signalled before. They are dominated by fire-extinguishers: shiny, oblong, providing safety and protection. As vertical elements dividing the canvas space, they introduce rhythms which fence the composition. As the artist says, they are epitomes of compressed animal sexuality, the foam confined into a metal enclosure, ready to erupt. These destructive connotations of a fire-extinguisher are also related to the motif of lighting, glowing, exploding and roasting. Changing colours of fire-extinguishers – red, pink, green and blue – bring to mind processes of burning down, drying up, freezing and forgetting.

Several characters reappearing in Zur’s paintings might be a key to decode his private tales in which gentle and shy elements turn into the profligate and murderous ones. His protagonists are constantly the same: roe deers, rabbits and lambs (in early series). All of them are encoded as tricksters – mediators between worlds. A dominant deer has a long iconographic tradition; timelessness of this topos is proved by a large amount of its representations even in distant cultures. It appears as a sacred animal, with a ritual of nuptial fights and a cyclic antlers casting, the king of forests (a Celtic Hern, a deity of fertility and harvest also called Cernnunos), the guide of souls of the dead led across dark woods, widely appearing in Medieval beastaries and described as an uncompromising killer of snakes symbolizing christians’ spiritual fight with a snake, the personification of darkness and evil. Because of its multilayered mythical and cosmologic meanings, the deer showed under the moon in the woods has quickly become an icon of bad taste. To Zur the theme of deer at a rutting ground, so intensely exploited by the Biedermeier painting, is the base for agressive travesty. Roe deers on the canvases are accompanied by hares or rabbits. Their lifestyle locate them among those dedicated to the Moon, makes them bound to the realm of night and dream – as animals inhabiting holes and characteristic for unusual fertility, they are associated with the Mother Earth, the underground, mysteries of death and revival. The last two features are associated with the white colour, the background of all Zur’s paintings, symbolizing processes of initiation in passage rites. The characters from the “Lancaster House” series invite the viewer to a long trip into one’s own memory and the unconscious. Looking at them hanging in empty monolithic background one is reminded of folk lullabys like farewells before a journey towards the unknown, falling into oneself. The very title of the series from the last two years brings associations with the 19th-century horror fiction about haunted estates. To continue, we come to C. S. Lewis’s old wardrobe stuffed with furs, in which a little girl, to her own surprise, finds a snowy land inhabited by strange creatures and involves herself in a series of psychodelic events. Zur, immersed in a narcotic trance, enters the world of illusions, balancing on the edge of losing consciousness. Similar to the female protagonist entering mythical Narnia, he freezes when he touches cuttingly cold and snowy branches instead of the familiar feel of fabrics in the wardrobe — the gate between worlds. He walks around the house full of labyrinth-like corridors, discovering more and more thrilling happenings in each of the rooms.

The mystery of the art of Rafał Zur reminds of “The Large Glass – The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even”, together with her speed boats and precisely drawn chocolate grinders, the idea of exchange between the domains of the bride and her bachelors. The alchemic-kabalistic interpretation of this enigmatic work by Marcel Duchamp resulting in the artists’s definite farewell to art and his dedication to chess might open up to hermetic, uncoded stories digged out by Zur from the deepest areas of consciousness.

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LETO GALLERY/Marta Kolakowska
ul. Hoza 9c, Warsaw, Poland
0501696440, 48224995916
galeria@leto.pl
www.leto.pl