∏#‡€*≠™ selected pieces 2023-2025              

Rawdogging a Painting, 2025, rotating pull-up bar, 120 x 50 x 40 cm, original oil painting, 30 x 40 cm 

A scam is a deceptive scheme, an attempt to trick a person into giving up something valuable. This horizontal bar scam simulation pits several deceptive practices, buzzwords and fads against each other. In the true spirit of meritocracy: may the best able-bodied man win!

Attention extractivism—forcing participants to look at a painting (that would normally get only a quick glance) for a 120 seconds under a pretense of giving them a shot at symbolic stoic resistance to instant gratification of disordered attention, amounts to a blatant appropriation of their time and labor, potentially increasing artwork’s worth hundredfold. Moreover, this worth grows almost exponentially, since assigning value in form of attention makes others pay attention too.

Engagement exploitation—spectator becomes an active participant in the spectacle, legitimizing it and laboring at it for free, literalizing the concept of spectatorship labor. Not only by performing (literally) manual labor, but also as an inadvertent recruiter and brand ambassador for the scam. In the neoliberal framework of instrumentalized relations every activity, including non-activity or anti-activity can be extracted, appropriated, and commodified.

Meritocracy—the myth of being rewarded according to talent and effort rather than inherited privilege, which neoliberalist ideology actively promotes to justify social inequality. Try reaching the bar without a foot stool.

Behaviorist experiment—a basic tool in the avant-garde arsenal that reinforces the myth of the enlightened, conceptually masterful savior-of-the-common-people artist-genius. Such cheap-thrill, unsolicited shock therapy often makes the public even more convinced that contemporary art is a shameless fraud, a money-laundering or tax-evasion scheme, a rage-baiting self-promotion.

Only the representational art is true, modest and honest. The strong, silent type. Stoic. Minding its own business. A winter oil landscape signifies timelessness of tradition—a kind look full of wisdom. It demands no surplus labor of interpretation; on the contrary, it offers a safe space, a peace of mind, a dream of just appropriation, free of locals and hidden agendas. Conversely, contemporary art is just a fleeting fad, like the rawdogging trend of 2024. So step right up, for a chance to have a timeless peace of mind.

Thank you for your attention! 

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Hybrid Sermon, 2025, video installation, 30:06, 8:26, metal crosses with Picatinny rails                                                             

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-20 €⁰, 2024, oil on canvas, 70 x 80 cm. Acquired for -40 € (20€ went to the “buyer”, and 20€ to the organizers)

Negative pricing occurs when supply drastically exceeds demand. When it happens, it is “cheaper” to pay for the product to be taken off one’s hands, than to endure storage, processing, packaging and shipping costs.

If we apply the conservative estimate that 1.6% of U.S. workers are professional artists to the global working age-population, we arrive at approximately 85 million active artists. Considering that being a professional artist is a privilege not attainable in many parts of the world, we can broaden the estimate to include both professional and “amateur” artists and still regard it as a very conservative number. If we speculate further that every artist makes roughly 50 artworks annually, we end up with over 4 billion artworks produced every year. Given the widespread accessibility of artistic production since the Technological Revolution, we can safely assume that the total number of artworks produced (and available today) over the past 100-150 years far exceeds the estimated annual output of 4 billion. Combined with shrinking demand due to ongoing dynamic in wealth concentration (with the top 10% holding 85% of world’s total wealth), ever-increasing market accessibility, and lowering entry costs due to social media, e-commerce, and international shipping this puts us into the oversupply area potentially bringing about conditions leading to flooded market and—in extreme cases—negative prices.

Negative pricing is a liminal space, where capitalism can become anti-capitalist. In Jean Baudrillard’s Symbolic Exchange and Death acts of giving, sacrifice, festivity and destruction are theorized to be more innate human behaviors than the capitalist notions of permanent competition, survival of the fittest and the “selfish gene”. These acts offer alternatives to the dominant practices and values of capitalist society.

For me, this action symbolizes an escape from conventional forms of production. The painting is not a product in the strictest sense—it wasn’t made to be a commodity. Furthermore, the paints, brushes, primer, stretcher, and canvas were gifted or recycled. There is no surplus value. There is no direct or monetary profit. In terms of rationality—there is no rational or common sense in selling a painting at a negative price. As for meaning, the painting is merely a flawed attempt at copying a photograph—on its own, it is not an example of artwork producing meaning.

Thus, giving the painting away along with a “convenience fee” is a small act of symbolic resistance, rejecting both capitalist production and capitalist logic.

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Art is Busywork, 2023, mixed media on canvas, 180 x 280 cm

I paid my artist-classmates an equivalent of 60€ per hour wage to “vandalize” my painting with a sentence that essentially states that artwork is not work.

In this piece, I explore the relationship between artwork and work. The issue received a broader attention during the pandemic, when it seemed that, in some countries, artists were receiving more support than essential workers—who, precisely because of their essentiality, found themselves drastically restricted in their rights. At the same time, the social media was filled with cries like “artwork is work”, “artwork deserves to be compensated”, and “support your local artists”.

This entitlement to wider recognition (be it symbolic or monetary) stems from the elitist nature of art and the genius-artist myth brought on by Enlightenment ideas, where artists, with their radical freedom and transformed consciousness, serve as models for citizens of future utopias, and by the consequent iteration of this aesthetic autonomy tradition that positions the avant-garde artist as a revolutionary visionary bringing that utopia to life.

A piece by a relatively established Belarusian artist (who once represented the country at a Venice Biennale) offers an example of that attitude. As a commentary on the lack of recognition for contemporary artists in Belarus, he staged a performance where he dressed himself in a factory uniform, smudged his face with black paint, and posed for photos later posted on an Employee-of-the-Month-type board. People attending the performance were encouraged to participate. Curators, business and IT people, bloggers, journalists and other artists cheerfully followed suit.

A more prominent example would be the Gramsci Monument by the self-styled “worker-soldier-artist” Thomas Hirschhorn. The outdoor sculpture was presented as an altruistic and collaborative project bringing a glimpse of utopia to underprivileged community in the Bronx. However, some critics saw it as a virtue-signaling and patronizing act of exploitation amounting to cynical reproduction of extractivism—a successful white male artist comes to a predominantly non-white low-income community, offers a short-term employment to a small group in that community to help him build an outdoor installation using intentionally low-cost and non-construction materials that houses the same services and offers the same experiences that local community centers provide year-round, claims it to be a creative collaboration, and after 77 days takes off to sell the installation piece by piece for tens of thousands of dollars.

I find the optics of such narratives at the very least to be class insensitive: while some artists merely cosplay proletariat, others reproduce and reinforce the same oppressive system they claim to transcend and (at least ephemerally) abolish—often in the name of workers. Artists are not proletariat. Artists own their means of production, they are rarely alienated from their work, they can decide what to do with the revenue, and they are often employing other artists, assistants and artisans. Proletariat possesses only their labor.

When a professional artist takes on a worker identity, there is always a suspicion that they are either blinded by their privilege and engage in a class blackface or trying to symbolically or financially profit from the class struggle. I state, therefore, that if and when art is work, it must be busywork.

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The Original Referent, 2023, mixed media on canvas, 150 x 200 cm

Michael: ...I don't make copies, I'm the boss. Got it? I make originals.

Ryan: Yeah I make originals too.

The Office: Season 5, Episode 23

This painting is the result of work. It affirms that originality is only truly possible in the absence of an author—not by creating, but rather in the process of doing.

I asked my college mates to write a sentence that holds an important meaning for them, that represents their individuality or originality, something so personal that it would “hurt” if I painted it over. Each sentence, quote, or saying they contributed was a signifier of a complex abstract idea—one that was itself a derivative or appropriated expression of their individualities. Each text is neither the idea it represents, nor the person using that idea to express themselves.

I wanted to see if it was possible to reverse that dynamic and get something original from references—a referent. At first glance, the process may seem like just another example of pastiche—a collage of symbolic texts. But each time something is written, I overpaint it to disrupt immediate intertextuality—simultaneous contrast of meanings, that might suggest an author’s intent.

By overpainting those short texts, I also erased meaning from the painting—designified it. In doing so I ended up with something original, “unique”—something that is not a copy. The work aims to challenge the separation of theory and praxis, mind and body, and by extension—intellectual and manual labor. The over-painting can be regarded as an act of destruction, which according to Jean Baudrillard is a more innate behavior (together with gift-giving, festivities and sacrificing) than production. One can make something original by destroying the copy. To break signification (Shklovsky’s defamilarization, Brecht’s Verfremdung, Derrrida’s différance), is to break free from habituation and become/experience original for the first time. Again.

Of course it is impossible to completely escape signification. The end result here will still be recognizable as a painting, seemingly inspired by Abstract-Expressionism, with all the semantic baggage that come with it, such as the lone (white male) “genius-artist”, a vanguard theorist, an investment vehicle, an interior design staple, and so on.

However, the real inspiration comes not from 1940s New York studios, but from the streets—specifically, from buffing—the overpainting of graffiti by the communal services. It is fascinating on two levels: first, by graffiti being an act of resistance to capitalist branding and urbanism (to signification); and second, as a visualization of a dialogical activity between graffiti artists and the city. It can be regarded as a trace of city’s own agency—the totality of city planning and clean walls provokes its inhabitants to act by spray-painting it with tags and graffiti, which in turn forces the city to react by covering them up with abstract shapes. Neither strives to make art, yet the resulting images often have that striking “drunken master” elegance, something most of the celebrated examples of Abstract-Expressionism lack.

In this case texts break the totality of painting and painting resists an imposition of meaning onto it. By overpainting the meanings, I also erase authorship, and by doing the work almost mechanically I abstain from mine. I’m not just copying a buffing. It’s not a simulation of overpainted graffiti, it is an overpainted graffiti.

It’s not an artwork—it’s an original. 

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