The public phone booth, where generations have spent hours and small fortunes talking to friends, family and lovers, where tears were shed and laughter echoed, seems to be a curiosity of the past, a ghosted presence in the urban landscape. One of my plans for the future is to re-imagine the phone booth. For now, I present here the best example of a public phone booth's organic role for (and inevitably its integration into) lively subcultures.

Lipstick (acrylic and oil pastel on canvas, 40x30) is the first in a series of paintings that question our dependence on objects for validation, attraction, confidence and gender identification. The object is larger than life, because larger than life is the space it occupies in our lives, and the text balances between existential threat and singalong lightness. 

Europe is either sinking into a new conservatism or it was sunken there all along and I think of it as new due to some misconception regarding the past. Anyhow, if the western world would like to progress in terms of thought, all school students should be taught Friedrich Nietzsche’s “Beyond Good and Evil” at the tender age of seventeen or so. It is crucial for our civilization to realize how the culture of blame and guilt has infiltrated into our lives. You see, Nietzsche – certainly susceptible to the personal flaws he blames others for, but perhaps exactly because of them – doesn’t beautify human nature. Or rather, he sees its beauty for what it is, through good and bad, beyond good and evil.

Certainly, there are perfectly good reasons to consciously choose and strive for the good, but isn’t it true that lying, cheating, deceiving, wanting and exerting power have all played their part in the, so called, advancement of the species? One should embrace human nature as a whole instead of detesting certain aspects of it and glorifying others. This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try for the better or that we shouldn’t be conscious of our choices, our actions and their consequences. However, burdening ourselves or our society with guilt leads to denial and therefore far from the purpose of understanding who we are and why we act as we do, which in turn hinders advancement. The seasoning of our lives with hedonistic accusation and guilt is an immediate impact of the western culture as a whole being constructed on foundations laid by the church, whose pull is still strong.

In fact, the church’s sickening doctrine has developed into a Frankenstein’s monster of its own accord, and Christianity’s venomous sting is now reproduced randomly into society. This is why we are faced with the interesting phenomenon of backward ethics and pretense morality being present even in the minds of people who call themselves atheists or agnostics. Besides, isn’t it a luminous point that Nietzsche makes that man, after having sacrificed everything in the name of god, including his own nature, had nothing left to sacrifice but god himself? The new morality of our era reminds me of dark, perhaps imagined, medieval times, and getting rid of it is imperative for a truly free humanity.