Paweł Czekański

The title “Post romantic stress disorder” is a paraphrase of a mental disorder, which is post-traumatic stress disorder, most often caused by a traumatic event. The project is a story about modern man against the background of global changes, using the themes of post-humanism and generational trauma.

The project presents personified figures made of vegetables, fruits such as cucumbers, chili peppers, carrots. They are arranged in genre scenes, in which the figures either copulate with each other or fight and beat each other. The entire exhibition presents a fight-orgy scene, which encourages associations with battle scenes, enclosed in the gallery space.

The exhibition is a continuation of a series of works presenting the motifs of food, vegetables, and fruits, which are a paraphrase of the famous words “You are what you eat” by the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach. He was a representative of gastrosophy – the philosophy of food and good food. He believed that what we do, how we act and think, is closely related to our food.

Working in the trend of posthumanism, the works fit into the global existential melancholy, somewhat perversely combining the object-subject relations, along with its hierarchy of beings. It is also a vision of the future in line with the desire to cross borders and expand the concept of man.

The irony and grotesque, the banality of the presented scene is also a reference to the trivialization of contemporary social and moral issues in the public space. Rapid consumerism, not only of food, obscures the true face of ourselves. Does man himself also become the object of this consumption?

Galerie města Třince, Czech Republic, 2025

Curated by Matěj Frank.