POP ’65 (2025), acrylic on canvas, 72×102 cm, black frame

Description

POP ’65 (2025) continues Prijon’s investigation into symbolic fracture and psycho-cultural memory, but here he turns directly toward the aesthetic turbulence of mid-1960s mass media. The canvas behaves like a malfunctioning broadcast—an overloaded signal where desire, glamour, commercial imagery, and human expression collide in a state of accelerated entropy.

Two iconic faces—one male, one female—appear torn into shard-like planes, as if disassembled by the very media machinery that once exalted them. These faces are not portraits but archetypes of the 1960s psyche: the charming idol, the seductive starlet, the era’s promise of fame and modernity. Their expressions oscillate between seduction, exhaustion, and distortion. They do not simply appear fractured; they are acted upon, pushed, pulled, stretched, and finally destabilized by the symbolic forces that surround them.

Diagonal lightning-like cuts, floating black rectangles, neon yellow signal flashes, and rhythmic violet lines move across the painting like data intercepts—interferences of a world saturated with advertisements, television static, and early pop-culture noise. These interruptions perform a kind of violence: they slice through the faces, break the continuity of memory, and reconfigure them into a mosaic of mediated identity.

A red music note asserts itself in the chaos, anchoring the entire composition in visual sound—not just music, but the cultural soundtrack of an era driven by mass entertainment and emotional overstimulation. It suggests rhythm, nostalgia, and also the commodification of creativity itself.

The work negotiates a tense balance between homage and critique. On one hand, artist acknowledges the seductive power of 1960s pop aesthetics—their glamour, their optimism, their mythologies. On the other hand, he exposes the erosion of subjectivity within that system. The figures appear caught mid-glitch, as if trapped inside their own icon status, losing humanity to the recursive loop of representation.

POP ’65 becomes a cinematic tableau of the 20th century’s turning point: a moment when images began to move faster than people, and when identity became something that could be manufactured, multiplied, fragmented—and sold.