Eat a Tomato (I am a tomato) — Franek Drażba  

I never thought I would ever call contemporary art avant-garde — and in a positive sense at that. And yet, in the case of Franek Drażba, it is difficult to find a better term. Not because his art continues a great tradition or engages in a dialogue with it, but because it refers to the original sense of the avant-garde: art that does not try to fit into the existing system, but consciously paves its own way. Not unlike the avant-gardists of the 20th century, Drażba paves the way not with political declarations, but with the artistic form itself. Yet this is where their affinity ends.     

Such a definition of the avant-garde may not, at first glance, fit Franek Warzywa [Franek the Vegetables], a character created by Franek Drażba who combines art, memes, music and viral videos, exploring how visibility and consumption rules affect the reception of culture. For Franek Drażba, who poses as Franek Warzywa, is very much present in the system. He performs concerts, acts online, exhibits and seemingly complies with the ‘rules of the game’. His aim, however, is not to achieve stability, but to confront the establishment, which builds power by distributing visibility and controlling attention. Virality and popularity are, for him, tools for testing boundaries: Drażba explores how far a work of art can move away from the classically defined art, remaining an art solely by virtue of its visibility. Even if this comes from pop culture, usually used for creative exploration rather than as a resource for symbolic capital. It is precisely this kind of work within the system, despite the risk of being absorbed by its logic of consumption, that is the common avant-garde act.      

The exhibition presents three sets of works that illustrate the development of the Franek Warzywa project which operates as a hybrid of performance, video and post-art. Whether physical or ephemeral, each work is created in response to the audience’s attention where the attention is turned into content. The first set includes a series of TikToks, in which the artist has explored the theme of vegetables and celebrities over the years: from giving tomatoes or carrots the faces of famous figures, to their consumption at the request of viewers, to self-consumption. The second group of works is related to his graduation project Napad na Bazar [The Vegetable Market Sting], a symbolic robbery of the vegetable stalls in the Koło Market in Warsaw. They reveal the artist’s symbolic capital built around the vegetable motif. The artist goes a step further, usurping exclusive rights to it, at the expense of people in no way associated with art. The third set of works includes the artist’s most recent work, in which Franek Warzywa appears as a musical star touring Europe, in a duo with Młody Budda. By adapting to consumption mechanisms, he gains subjectivity, as evidenced by numerous fanart that reproduces it. Constant exposure is the price he pays, and he talks about it in a clip for the song 6 słońc [Six Suns].     

The exhibition  Eat a Tomato (I am a tomato) demonstrates how, despite being embedded in pop culture, Drażba’s work pushes the boundaries of art, involving the viewer in a process where their interactions and expectations create the content of the works. Rather than withdrawing from the system, Drażba exploits it, creating a space for reflection on the autonomy of art in the contemporary world caught up in consumption and constant attention.