There’s a lot of art about birth, death and rebirth, but not a lot of it uses pickles. Preserves, however, are all over Polish artist Rafał Zajko’s biggest solo show yet. Big jars of brine filled with salty cucumbers and little figurines in the shape of cryogenic preservation chambers. That combination of the fantastically sci-fi and the mundanely everyday is Zajko’s hallmark. The young London-based artist has spent the past few years showing ceramic and concrete sculptures filled with flights of cybernetic romanticism and nods to vaping, baking and pickling.
In The Spin Off, as this show at Focal Point Gallery in Southend is called, he has gone on a deep dive into a vast mess of ideas about longevity and rebirth. The centre of the space is dominated by an ovoid floor sculpture that gets moved and reshaped throughout the week. Laid across its surface, ceramic tiles are assembled to look like a map of planetary systems or control panels for alien spaceships, covered in incomprehensible knobs, buttons and displays. Circular sections of it can be lifted out and replaced with items from the cabinets on the wall: little concrete eggs, ceramic kaiser rolls, jars of pickles.
Eggs are everywhere. They’re in vitrines cut into benches around the space. They’re formed into huge uncomfortable stools in the middle of the gallery (a nod to designer Philippe Starck’s iconic but useless lemon squeezer). They’re nestled in reliefs on the wall that look like maps of future cities. They’re symbols of rebirth, of perseverance and survival.
In the other main gallery space, a huge red eye in a vast plastic bubble blinks at you and flashes lasers as it burps out an endless cloud of vape smoke, a polluted miasma of surveillance state aesthetics, as if Zajko is asking what the point of living forever is if you’re going to be watched the whole time.
Lining the walls between the galleries, Zajko has painted frescoes of eggs and those Philippe Starck juicers, surrounding a huge relief of grey humanoid bodies studded with pink chewing gum. Vitrines are filled with architectural sculptures made of upcycled church candles.
The whole thing is caked in references to pop culture (each work is named after a film that’s had at least one remake, A Star is Born, Funny Games, Cruel Intentions), art and design history, Polish mythology, and on and on. It feels overthought and under-edited. It’s so excited by its own endless references that the story of the work gets a little lost in the process.
That’s a shame because, first of all, the aesthetic is great. Zajko is unique: it’s like a pastel-coloured Alien; a gentle, cotton candy take on sci-fi horror; a 1990s McDonald’s designed by a xenomorph; a Mattel Metropolis. It’s attractive, alluring, you want to touch all of it, get lost in it.
The main thrust of the show, the primary idea, is brilliant. It’s so full of the fear of death and anxiety about the future: this is the art of a mind buzzing with apprehension about what’s next and trying desperately to hold on to some sense of self. Yet this esoteric sci-fi and heavy theorising is rooted in the everyday – thanks to those bread rolls and pickles. It gives everything a sense of joy and humour, a link to the past, to reality. Living forever, seeing what the future holds, may be terrifying, but at least there’ll be pickles.
