DOMOBAAL

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Testicles with Moustache

oil on canvas, 122×97cm (48"×38.2") 2006, photo by Andy Keate (private collection, London)

"Ansel Krut's paintings often feel like propositions regarding the medium's capacity for building energy from multifariousness. 'Testicles with Moustache' for example, is a dense simultaneity of displacements: the apparent subject of a pinwheeleyed, behatted head rising over a wall – or an ocean – of scuffed paint, is soon made unsteady. Cheeks and lips, you realize, do double–duty as thighs and booted calves; the nose is a pendulous pair of testicles, and so on. But this physical doubling, extending onto gender (and riding on deceptively rough–looking handling that enfolds a delicate touch), subtends an emotional one. The pictured subject's beleaguered emotional state won't hold, so indecorously extreme is it – it wants to flip over into some sort of joke. The pervasive instability won't let that reading dominate either; nor will the content settle. A painterly recasting of the famous duck/rabbit image, it's a portrait of selfhood constantly collapsing into its other, enabled by the fluid permissions of paint."

Martin Herbert, June 2006