“Odd”

Amid the pandemic lockdown, nothing is what appears to be.

It’s a disturbing time where naturalism is no longer the rule. All the things we considered as set are not; faces half covered, no kissing, no hugs, talking in the distance, cracked hands, sitting apart, empty terraces, shops’ entrances being more like operating rooms. The world is turned upside-down and we might be coping with weird scenes, moments that push us to degenerate our surroundings into something eccentric and insane. Literally, it’s a semantic anarchy, a poetic divorce between symbols and reality.

During this pandemic time, I found myself inmers in considering this extraordinary circumnstances as an opportunity to document the odd, a disruptive gaze for a disturbing moment. An attempt to forget the physical representation of the objects, the conventional or the “rules” attached to them. The point is that there are no rules; thus, the artistic representation or connotation has to be figured it out by the spectator. Persective, shading, colour, words are limiting our imaginary just when looking at something, so, let’s remove this on the equation. As Tristan Tzara once wrote: “Logic is always wrong“. And as we are not living in a logic world, might be a good advice to follow.

Simply, here are shown a serie of bizarre stuff, uncommon, uncanny, obscure, weird things, illogical, incoherent, deprived from all human will and which confront our set of rules and common understanding of how they should be, found in the streets of Trójmiasto amid the pandemic lockdown.

Absurd art? These are objects or scenes that embody denotation and nihilism, but at the same time they are made to confront, to shock and repel – often without denotation itself, without purpose-, the viewer’s idea and gaze. Close to Dadaism movement, by rejecting the traditional views of simple objects and turn upside-down the semantics of them, we can start to question what is that kind of reality and how it should look like.

“I was interested in ideas, not merely in visual products”, said Marcel Duchamp, one of its pioneers. I’ve combined pictures from forgotten objects on the street, uneven or bumpy buildings, ‘colourish’ walls, non ‘spottable’ objects and shapes. Unbiased by the work itself, observe the simple “idea” of them.

Nothing more matters right now, giving this disruptive moment, then presenting everyday objects and give the viewer the chance to transform them.

More about the pandemic lockdown update’s about Gdansk, found here.