Popcorn und Saure Gurken

With Popcorn and Pickles, artists Eugénie Didier, Roxana Halls, Christine Brey, and Viktoriia Oreshko invite us into a painterly and cinematic exhibition. The snacks referenced in the title serve as symbols for the artists' stories and personal experiences, framing the cinema as a voyeuristic encounter between proximity and distance. "Popcorn" stands for scopophilia and the sweetness of the mainstream; the pickles evoke a cinema beyond Hollywood: Eastern European, peripheral, reluctant. Like a good Hollywood film, the paintings and drawings on display seduce us with their detailed realism and compelling narratives. But take heed: what is on view here is no comfortable blockbuster. The experience is layered and contradictory, much like the taste of sour pickles alongside sweet popcorn.

"In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female," wrote the British film theorist Laura Mulvey in 1975 in her groundbreaking feminist film theory essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. What Mulvey described for the cinema screen has, in the digital age, multiplied and branched out in countless directions. The philosopher and cultural critic Byung-Chul Han diagnoses in his essays In the Swarm (2013) and The Transparency Society (2012) a new logic of the gaze: a society in which the subject willingly puts itself on display, in which visibility becomes a moral obligation, and in which the perpetual staging of the self on social media platforms produces a new form of control, one that submits to the tyranny of likes. The gaze has been democratised, but it has not become freer. It has become faster, more fleeting, more voracious. Scrolling has replaced looking. The selfie has replaced the portrait. Within this accelerated economy of the gaze, the slow, bodily seeing practised by these four painters reads as an act of resistance.

Viktoriia Oreshko focuses on the stories of objects and what they reveal about the people who once surrounded them. Inflated balloons after a birthday party, religious icons, a chair inviting us to linger in a room. With photorealistic precision, the Ukrainian artist, now living in Paris, paints everyday objects that speak on behalf of those no longer present. These objects become artefacts and witnesses of time. Stability and normalcy attach themselves to the everyday, to the banality of things that offer grounding in times of war and destabilisation. Yet Oreshko does not satisfy the voyeuristic gaze; it finds no anchor and drifts across the picture plane. The viewer's eye becomes an investigator in a silent room where the private is inevitably political.

Eugénie Didier shows bodies but no faces. Hands passing pancakes, figures backlit during moments of leisure. Her painting vibrates with Mediterranean colour, composed with the painterly sensibility of a film shot. Mulvey described how the classical male gaze fragments the female body in order to sexualise it. Didier fragments to achieve the opposite: universality rather than fixation. The absence of the face is not an erasure. It is an invitation to identification. In a visual culture dominated by faces, by selfies, profile pictures, and filter masks, the omission of the face is a radical gesture. Her images taste sweet and melancholic at once, like popcorn with a hint of salt during a holiday that could go on forever.

Roxana Halls stages precisely what the male gaze desires and puts it on display. Her oil paintings depict mannequins, newly dressed and styled, rendered in Old Master technique on canvas. The "to-be-looked-at-ness" that Mulvey attributed to the female figure in film becomes a trap here: whoever looks discovers that they have fallen for a simulacrum of a real person. Halls herself says: "I often experience painting as a form of performance." From a queer perspective, and here Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity (Gender Trouble, 1990) resonates, gender becomes visible as what it truly is: construction, masquerade, repeated gesture. In her series Wayward Women, Halls celebrates film heroines who defy social conventions. Rather than copying individual film scenes, she heightens the emotional expression of their faces, creating cinematically charged portraits: faces that look back and refuse to conform to mere ideals of beauty.

Christine Brey draws in graphite, creating atmospherically charged worlds through the directness of the line. Her monochrome black and white contrast lends her scenes a cinematic quality, as though we were looking at stills from a film that was never made. In her series Give me a Smile, she portrays relationships between women: gestures of closeness, moments of silence. Intimate scenes that place the viewer in a voyeuristic position while simultaneously making them pause. For Christine Brey refuses the consuming gaze: her figures are subjects possessed of their own, inaccessible interiority. One figure, caught in a mirror, invokes Lacan's mirror stage, the moment in which the subject recognises and simultaneously misrecognises itself. In doing so, Brey intervenes in the hierarchies of the gaze, reversing the historically male dominated perspective and establishing a genuinely female point of view. Her work becomes a counterpoint to voyeuristic consumer culture. Here, one does not stare. One participates. The gaze becomes an encounter.

Take a seat. The lights are dimming. Reach into the popcorn bag or help yourself to a pickle from the jar. What happens when women take the director's chair? What happens when women artists pick up the brush and, rather than reproducing the male gaze, reinvent the very act of looking? This exhibition responds with four positions that understand the viewer's gaze as an embodied and reciprocal act. Embodied, because we never look at things neutrally: our gaze always issues from a body that carries experience, that is vulnerable, that brings its own history. Reciprocal, because what is seen here does not remain an object but looks back. The bodies and spaces in these images speak, are staged, and enter into a dialogue with the viewer. Like film stills, they invite us to become part of a story that is never fully graspable, one that oscillates between attraction and repulsion. Therein lies the feminine and queer dimension of these positions: they generate a participatory gaze rather than a hierarchising one, a gaze that touches rather than possesses.