The Rochelle School Arnold Circus London E2 7ES
Private View: Thursday 19th April, 6 – 9 pm Show Runs: 20th April – 5 th May
His work is genuinely disturbing and unsettling. The world into which we are drawn is simultaneously seductive and repellent but it repays scrutiny and its impact is substantial and lasting. This is one of the most original voices that I have come across in recent years.
– Robert Devereux
Onania is an infected universe that has been accumulating character and detail since Jan Manski’s MA at Central Saint Martins in 2010. Onania’s development has been unrelentingly pervasive of Manski’s practise, appropriate to its nature as a diseased scourge.
Manski’s meticulous and total attention to minute detail has borne a product encased in the methodologies of this eminently inviting and hostile environment. Onania hosts an alternate reality and fertile breeding ground for mankind’s most despicable modern habits. Narcissism bred from frantic consumer culture is shown at its most destructive, with Onania’s inhabitants seeking its prime offering – unadulterated and uninterrupted pleasure.
The Onanizer- Your Ultimate Masturbation Experience is at the root of Onania. Designed to mould seamlessly to the user’s body, the ‘limitless pleasure’ machine invites its users to a realm of singular focus on themselves. Sophisticated advertising tricks are played on our atavistic compulsions of fulfilling basic instincts and impulses. The viewer is subjected to subtle psychological bombardment by Manski’s movie, until we respond as he requires. Such sinister manipulation hovers beneath a seamless pastel veneer, pivoting on our powerlessness and ignorance of Manski’s role as puppet master. The Onanizer reflects the ultimate aim of Onania, which is the most perfect and heightened existence of blissful solitude.
As a medieval plague, it rapidly infects and disfigures Onania’s inhabitants, presented in Manski’s glossily ubiquitous, cloying pink. These objects form a series entitled Aetiology Unknown. Skulls, leather, teeth and terrifyingly dated surgical instruments bulge and surge against each other in these sculptures. Even the machine itself is disfigured by a grotesque seepage; combinations of human fat sourced from liposuction clinics, and synthetic materials, largely vinyl acetate. Natural and manufactured elements are brought into fearfully close proximity and become interchangeable, blurring the secure borders of human recognition and refusing reassurance.
Manski is meticulous in his construction methods and highly attentive to all areas of his production system. He cites the wrathful fury of Bosch and Bruegel’s imagery as prominent influences on his conception of Onania. Manski draws parallels between these environments determined by Catholicism’s insistence on a rhetoric of sin and punishment, pivotal to his understanding of growing up in post-Soviet Poland.
The exhibition presents Onania in its entirety, from sculptures and videos to documentation of its growth and processes. It offers an extensive survey of a terrifying, mythical universe. This show is an invitation to explore Manski’s world, constructed from a self-confessed ‘maniac’s passion’.
