The phrase “Erotic Massacre” raises the expectations of the viewer, through the prism of the artist’s vision. It depicts a world overtaken by massacre: mass slaughter of defenceless, often underage consumers left on the border between reality and the digital world, rained on from outside and in by visual elements stuck in perpetual motion. The viewer strives to find the key ideas hiding under the guise of religious values and codes of ethics, a smog. But the exhibition and therefore the artist’s work intends the opposite of a mere spiritless intrusion of her own illusions onto the recipient – the customer.
Using classic collage – a postmodern technique adapted to be temperamentally the artist’s own – these works take us back to the period before the digital revolution, disconnected from the virtual world of capitalism. It is in this harking back to youthful black-and-white themes through colour composition formed in a period of visual smog that the artist establishes the basic paradox of life – a unique ideal form, the virtual world which is located within each of us.
In her works the artist depicts everyday images transformed by media, projected onto the individual eye of each beholder. From the beginning she has found a balance of kitsch, recognition and false re-assurance, but mainly knowledge of the world as it really is.
From the first drop of paint, symbol of the primal world, cascading onto the fibres of handmade paper, Ena Ban traverses a wide spectrum of artistic creation and life experiences. The artist’s struggle with her own identity has led to the composition of unique works, where the finished whole demonstrates the underlying cohesion of the work and its importance in the continuous discovery of variants of meditation and the power of primal elements and approaches.
After the loss of illusions, in the framework of a post-ideological notion about the world of people, the artist presents the real world – the “new physicality of the virtual world” – from an austere perspective and with a clear view to the near future. She shows us a painting, a collage, which is distinguished by a strong, subjective, emotive and creative need without the necessity for prior intellectualisation. Using basic of principles of the digital image and its basic building block – the pixel – she creates with complete certainty and self-knowledge.
While in previous work interest in the organization of order, the creation of a system and its qualitative changes fully pushed the story to the margin of her interest, in the project Erotic Massacre she pursues a person in relation to the self. Like Foucault, she examines – by means of the kind of games of truth and untruth a person comes to thinking about his or her own existence, by means of the kinds of games of truth a person recognized in the self the desirous-yearning being? Desiring after love, power, wealth,….violence. Foucault’s philosophical thinking (Discipline and Punish: The Birth of Prison, The History of Sexuality, Power, Madness and Civilization…) influenced the artist’s spirit in the whole of her essence. The artist sensitively approaches herself as to an individual; she seeks values and the sense of her own behaviour, her own obligations, her own pleasures, feelings, sensations and dreams.