150 Monkeys

The Krasnals
150 Monkeys
18.03.2011 - 29.03.2011
Art Agenda Nova, Cracow
























'All this LPRs actions – it's a creeping censorship! - - increasingly the gallerists and curators debates with themselfs: to exhibit some artist or not to exhibit...'
Łukasz Guzek


Attention!
Before you see this exhibition, read carefully this text or get yourself a banana.

Fifty serigraphs, one hundred and fifty monkeys, one group, ten, hundreds, millions, and maybe even miliards of members. It must be The Krasnals' display.

- Mummy, look! Sasnal repainted the painting by Whielki Krasnal!
- No, darling it's...wait, I couldn't tell you who was first – Whielki Krasnal or Sasnal?

This is only an assumptive conversation which maybe some day will come, if Krasnals are showed at so called „showroom”. But certainly not impossible because recently I heard childs question: Who was first: Sasnal or Krasnal? My answer suprised me, I said immediately: Whielki Krasnal and who?
Of course, the first was Sasnal. After all The Krasnals made a big time basing on his works. They emerged at the best moment when curators and critics became so arrogant to promote such man as Wilhelm Sasnal. Opponents of The Krasnals impute to them that they catch to well-known artists and because of that they become famous. By the way, it is not on which all conteporary art bases refering all the time to somebody? Sasnal himself was saying that he couldn't make anything from his imagination, he is only repainting existing paintings.
Whielki Krasnal is doing the same. He takes not his painting and repaits it. Moreover, it always better than the original. It is the same with „Untitled (Group of Monkeys with White Bananas)”. Tjis painting is the response to Sasnal's „Monkeys with white margin”. For the joke prepared by The Krasnals fell even the auction house Christie's pricing this painting for sevety thousand pounds. They cancelled the price only then they realized that Whielki Krasnal (because that signature was on the painting) is not Wilhelm Sasnal. Do The Krasnals make anything new? No. At bottom they're making a travesty.
Through their activity The Krasnals are trying to discover how art world looks like. They're jeering all this artists who are giving themselfs to curators' hands but loudly announcing their independendence. This how it is until they finish up at directors' and get schedule for years. How it looks like you can see at Whielki Krasnals painting „Dreams' Factory”.
It's The Krasnals who are trying to answer the question where is the place for artist. The best depiction of the hierarchy in the art world is the pyramid of animals. On the painting there are three monkeys. At the bottom, the biggest monkey is the artist, than there is the curator (smaller one), topmost there is the critic. After the biggest and the strongest always stands someone smaller but more clever. Someone who will tell which way choose.
The main, and the only one character of this exhibition which is „Untitled (Group of Monkeys with White Bananas)” is also very meaningful. He shows clearly that contemporary artist is like monkey. He will scream blue murder announcing his freedom and predominance but at the end he will follow the one with the bananas.