Faculty of Fine Arts, Painting Department

PhD course final exhibition

The works were created with the intention of performing a “biopsy” of a “phenomenological tumour”. It is suspicious, potentially fatal (or not, in case we undeviatingly apply the early Christian literature on the disease, especially St. Augustine, and we view the disease as a corrective), but that cannot be claimed with certainty without careful observation. It’s called Modern. It is an epoch, the creator of two totalitarian ideologies that destroyed tens of millions of people, it is a kaleidoscope through which oculus randomly created images seduce and amaze. The Modern politically enlightens art, the Modern criminalizes ornament, reduces, thinks about urban metabolisms and contemplates the possibilities of democratization of comfort, it is a discontinuity, it resists the established social organism, it is one of the fluids in the Machiavellian sense and, through its synthesizing capabilities, it gives birth to the greatest achievements of civilization but also conceives the conditions for its greatest collapse, giving birth to the totalitarianisms of the twentieth century. I tried to understand the possible motives for that sprain by analyzing a sample of tissue – John Entenza’s “Case Study” project. Content hyperproduction and instant culture have brought, as a collateral phenomenon, the extinction of ideologies and the coagulation of critical thinking span. The idea that society, as a creation analogous to the human understanding of the order of things, is viewed as an organism on its own, the intention to think of anthropobiological processes as physiobiological, appeared during the High Renaissance. This optics, tailored by Machiavelli’s pen, imposes itself as the only effective way for social anamnesis and successful sociological diagnostics. Machiavelli speaks of “humours” (fluids) flowing through the social organism, in constant conflict, whose dialectical relationship contributes to eternal friction and the struggle for supremacy. If we moved away from medical vocabulary for a moment, we would also view society as a tapestry woven of countless permeated fibres, if each of them, each constituent, each thread represented an individual event, an individual social group. All these inevitable entwinements, different from each other, provide a unique coherence, view, image, display. Their paths, however, are not straightforward, they necessarily touch, loop, but each loop must be in the function of the whole, it must justify and follow the given logical pattern. Each mistake, each anomaly, if it is not removed, increases, entangles the thing and distorts the image (idea) of the worker (demiurge) on the loom. If we returned to medicine from this historical determinism and viewed these loops as a grouping of cells of one organism, we would talk about an anomaly, a tumour.