Description by Filmoteka Muzeum
Osmosis is the second, after Untitled, joint production of Krzysztof Zarębski and his wife Krystyna Jachniewicz, renowned painter. The film is a documentation of erotic rituals in their private apartment, blurring the borders between the space of art and daily life.
The complex structure of the work is based on the correspondence of specific media, i.e. film, performance and references to painting-like images. It makes itself particularly manifest when conventional film documentation is transformed into a time-lapse sequence presenting the subsequent stages of ritual decoration of a naked woman.
Tapping into refined aesthetic and conceptual means, Zarębski tackles here his basic erotic theme – “perversion which somewhat merges physical love with hatred and subversion, expressing the destructive mechanisms of Thanatos.” The artist’s pursuit of arriving at and visualising the profoundness of sexual-aesthetic experience also lends itself to interpretation as a radical critique of the asexual Polish public sphere of the 1970s.
References: K. Piotrowski, Krzysztof Zarębski. Erotematy słabnącego Erosa. Przyczynek do dziejów sztuki performance w Polsce i Stanach Zjednoczonych po 1968 roku, CCA Elektrownia, Radom 2009; Ł. Ronduda, Polish Art of the 70s. Avant-garde, Warsaw 2009.
(ŁM)