THE INFANTILIZATORS

Paintings from the series "The Infantilizators" are populated by the contemporary consumer-men, individuals shocked by the surrounding reality, overwhelmed with an excess of stimuli, their faces frozen in a bizarre grimace combining greed and surprise. Goggleeyed and with bared teeth, the characters resemble zombies - hypnotized creatures, stripped off any free will or conscience, automatically responding to external stimuli. In case of infantilizers, the stimuli are of course audio-visual and come from the mass media, billboards and shop windows attacking the consumers from all sides with offers of yet another product without which our lives will surely be deficient. Interestingly enough, all this takes place against a plain background of homogeneous color. The whole abundance of products is usually reduced to a single item - the character's facial expression reveals the rest.

Perhaps not coincidentally, the title of the series brings to mind Benjamin R. Barber's book Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole, which is an attempt at a critical analysis of the socio-economic situation in the Western World. As Barber points out, large corporations ensure that they reduce adult consumers of goods and entertainment to children who easily act upon the impulse to own, and that children themselves are raised to be ready-made consumers never allowed to confront their infantile id ruled by the pleasure principle and determined to satisfy its basic drives. A similar thought can be found in Albert Oszek's paintings, whose subjects include adults with child-like mentality, or children whose ability to critically assess the usefulness of material goods is disabled at the early stages of development.