The World Is Waning and I Am Wankin

The sculpture refers to the photograph which was widely circulated online a few years ago, showing a charred human figure from Pompeii. What caused a sensation was the corpse’s suggestive position – the victim of the volcano froze in a posture implying masturbation. Kasper Lecnim’s work is a sketch simplifying the figure known from numerous photographs, and then making it three-dimensional again in sculptural form. The omnipresent visual comicality, so characteristic of post-Internet times, is potentially present in almost every image. Multiplied in countless, unforeseeable ways, impossible to interpret, 4chan- and 8chan-processed, it was frozen by the artist for a while in a concrete, “real” shape. 

Almost self-immolating, “the wanker” has his heroic moment of agency, a discussion with the volcano. And despite the complete fictitiousness of this situation, when we stand in front of the sculpture we are confronted with an object which is experientially different from the on-screen simulation, a classic hoax, pseudo-knowledge and ubiquitous infotainment. Filtered through the bloodstream of internet memes, the ancient Dionysian motif returns in Kasper Lecnim’s work, with cosmic eroticism in its centre and life desiring itself, indifferent to the fate of individuals. Optimistic in a new, inhuman, or perhaps post-human way.   

 

Kasper Lecnim (born 1990) is a visual artist, graduate of the E. Geppert Academy of Fine Arts in Wrocław. He uses a number of media. The activities he has done include making scarves, organizing removals, clearing snow, crashing cars and challenging managers of cultural institutions to duels. He lives in Warsaw. He works individually and in a duo with Irmina Rusicka. He has presented his works at solo and collective exhibitions in such places as the Wrocław Contemporary Museum, Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, BWA Warsaw, Gdańsk City Gallery, Widna Gallery in Cracow, 8th Young Triennale in Orońsko. He is represented by Galeria Szara.