What would death look like if we stripped it of all that gloomy physical entropy? Would it be one big hallucination, where reality becomes subjected to absurd logic, distorted memories, and emotions? This inverted image of the world is already visible in one of Lucas’s works, which depicts the head of Pan, the Greek god of nature, wilderness, and primal senses, who, like a grotesque jester, has just stood on his head. It is his perspective that we are forced to adopt. This inversion also accompanies Natalia’s works, where we recognize familiar objects and items, but through small modifications and deformations, they seem haunted and cruelly insignificant. Like the object resembling a display case, which, due to its horizontal arrangement, begins to take on the role of a glass coffin, behind which blurred shapes of carefully collected trinkets and unnecessary knick-knacks emerge.

The entire exhibition resembles a carefully prepared mock-up of a seemingly engaged life, filled with objects, memories, and our unfulfilled aspirations. We are left to complete this space, where we can safely make faces and play out roles that aren’t our own. In this context, Lucas’s works seem to be afterimages of remembered toy blocks and all those add-on accessories that nicely decorate our existence, thoroughly barricading us within. The castle will eventually become too small for us, and the model car locked in a jar will soon be placed on the shelf. Only a clean, though broken, shovel disturbs this seemingly beautiful picture. Is this what digging one’s own grave looks like?

The titular “second death” is, therefore, the worst possible kind. It is death even though we are still alive. A spiritual and existential failure, where, surrounded by goods and an orderly life, we realize the insignificance and triviality of our choices and ambitions. While working on the exhibition, I recalled Susan Sontag’s “Death Kit”, in which we learn the story of Dalton Harron, “Dudley” as the author writes about him, further emphasizing his safe and comfortable adaptation to societal expectations. Dudley, “though not fully alive, was endowed with life. But that’s not the same thing. Some people simply are their lives. Others, like Dudley, just inhabit them.” The protagonist of this story lives but cannot authentically experience life, getting caught in an oneiric, hallucinogenic spiral that leads him to a fatal obsession, as if that final, physical end of our existence, which we will all inevitably face, was the only authentic thing he could experience. Poor Dudley had not truly been alive for a long time. Devoid of desires, fascinations, and real emotions, he wandered about, surrounded only by the semblances of life he imagined. Natalia and Lucas’s exhibition perfectly captures the moment when, by slightly shifting our perspective, we can see whether we have already died.

— Przemek Sowiński