Oliver Bak at ADZ Gallery

Artist: Oliver Bak

Exhibition title: Sick with Bloom

Venue: ADZ Gallery, Lisbon, Portugal

Date: June 2 – July 2, 2022

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and ADZ Gallery, Lisbon

During a moment of happy fatigue I notice the trail of two planes creave across my drugged, blue sky. The serene machines are muted from the vast distance, and yet I can feel a membrained version of their roar. It’s a technicality but I can’t decide if the beauty of the situation is conven-tional or a special taste acquired along the way to this perfect point in time and space. One of the planes inch closer to the trail of the other, about to thread it with a touch and continue their elongated X far into the above of the horizon. I lose my daily script. The X becomes an x and then slowly an x as it recedes behind the planes like a tattoo made of milk. I’ve lost my daily script. This has happened before.

When we forgot to caretake as the rules changed overnight, for example. Or when we blindly followed the path of others into the future because the trail smelled nicely.

If we’re all poised to become social soup, some of us shall identify as vegetables while others must become poultry for the world kitchen to keep cooking. Some of us must gaze endlessly into the flowers attached to the ground that found our lives and protect our boundaries from constant transgression. Little spinners in the wind that frantically haul that precious O2 like an exhaust of pure exteriority, just blowing naturalist judgement straight into our faces, just blowing at it with what’s up from the outside, pulling our bodies into the realms we desire or even bleaker territory. Cheers.

Is it a well documented fact that chickens are scared of themselves and that’s why they choose to live in big stocks? An animal that chose to become mass instead of being, is that what ancient studies showed? The vital gasses hauled through the flowers bring with it special tonality and sound, and sound, like paint, has lyrics coded into it.

I propose to sing a poultry song of misconstrued power to the farmers who decry the behaviour of the poultry masses. “Flawless, none of us, none of us are sane, just the three of us. Who’s a bigot who’s an octopus, who got flawless, who got principles, none of us.”

Days go by without a single drop of conscience to affect the transitions of my moods. The more you stay away from people the more that soothing lethargy becomes a buoy between self pity and traditional joy. The anti to the party but not wholly unlike some AM feels. When the generosity of a social momentum fades exactly as it’s programmed to from nature’s side. A vibe-less chilling occurs when the party has gone on for longer than the charitable oxytocin can withhold. Its members expel the noise, deter the drama around them and turn to silence as a means of atmospheric maintenance. Withholding the collapse, extending the climax. Since the buzz that connects them is chronically available, but without a language, without articulation at least, maybe they start living inside the image of themselves.

Would you rather live inside the details or do you prefer to exist inside the timeline? Either way blinding yourself from the motifs that history tries to spell out the day after tomorrow. I wonder how many times the most foundational things must be said in order to ring true. How many songs we must listen to before we understand that pain and gain is bondaged, that love hurts, etc etc. When do we accept that the unleashed dog is maybe not your friend? That the soup you drink from is endless, it will never run dry as long as the flowers are spinning. It will take some time getting used to, surely. Meanwhile… I don’t know…

-Louis Scherfig, 2022