OFLUXO

Down in the city are the nice houses and the so-so houses and the lovers making out in dark yards and the babies crying for their moms, and I wonder if, other than Jesus, this has ever happened before. Maybe it happens all the time. Maybe there’s angry dead all over, hiding in rooms, covered with blankets, bossing around their scared, embarrassed relatives. Because how would we know?
(George Saunders, Sea Oak)

In Sea Oak George Saunders draws us into a grotesque although thrilling story of a soft-hearted auntie who passes away unfulfilled, then suddenly gets up from her grave to finally get everything she secretly wanted from her life – at the same time managing a violent recovery plan in the miserable lives of her loved ones.

Tomek Baran’s works – seemingly loosely assembled, but in fact intricately constructed from scraps of ordinary things, building materials, and finally – reused fragments of old paintings – seem to call for similar attention. We, young painters, look at them with pleasure, reflecting on what the spirits of the twentieth-century masters of formalism that we are evoking today would demand from us. Observing Tomek’s works, we can feel their inner beat. Maybe the zombie isn’t so scary as it is painted?