Acrylic on canvas, 60 x 60 cm
From the series: Iconoclasm
AVE I is a painted echo of a live moment — a gesture extracted from Simona Kasprowicz’s performance AVE, where the artist explores exhaustion, resistance, and self-reclamation. In this image, the performance is not reproduced, but transfigured: the body becomes mythic, abstracted, uncontained by realism. What we see is not the performer, not even a memory — but a state. A moment of rupture. A becoming.
The figure emerges from a black void, its edges roughly delineated in a pale halo-like outline — a boundary that marks presence but also fragility. The head is tilted back, the mouth slightly open, hands grasping the face: a pose that wavers between rapture and breakdown, ecstasy and suffocation. In Christian iconography, it recalls the upward gaze of saints in ecstasy — Bernini’s St. Teresa, or Caravaggio’s Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy. But here, that moment is corrupted, electrified, rendered in acid green, bruised crimson, and searing white.
This is not divine surrender — this is confrontation. The figure appears flayed and burning, the skin turned inside out, as if the emotional violence of the performance has been seared into the canvas. The brushwork distorts and saturates, echoing the expressive grotesquerie of Francis Bacon, while the almost cartoonishly bright palette evokes a warped pop aesthetic, reminiscent of Warhol’s silkscreens — particularly the repetition and color distortion of his Marilyns. But where Warhol’s stars were flattened into consumable icons, this figure resists: it bleeds. It bites back. It refuses to be smoothed into desire.
AVE I stages a queer martyrdom that is not about transcendence, but about staying. About inhabiting the body — trans, femme, fragile, furious — as a site of survival. The gesture is not decorative; it is carved from real pain, and yet remains theatrical, self-aware. The drag of it is not an artifice, but a method of truth-telling: exaggerated, stylized, but never less than honest. The glowing, almost radioactive green touches — especially on the eyes, hands, and chest — hint at toxicity and mutation. The figure is not healed; it is transforming.
In the context of Simona Kasprowicz’s practice, AVE I is both documentation and reinvention. It is an extension of performance into the realm of image — a process of making the ephemeral tactile again. The work doesn’t seek to represent the performance faithfully, but to hold its afterimage — distorted by memory, trauma, and visual processing. In doing so, it allows the viewer to encounter AVE not as a narrative, but as an atmosphere: dense, unresolved, sacred and feral all at once.
Here, the body is icon and ruin. Prayer and protest. A queer body on fire — not to be purified, but to be seen.