About 'SCAM' , text by Žanete Liekite
Painting begins as an encounter. An awkward, tentative flirtation with something just out of reach. If not a sacred ritual, then at least an act of faith, a wager against the obvious. A challenge to ordinary perception, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty might say. The crayon moves expressively, the surface yields, and in that exchange, the artwork becomes a space for contemplation. But then the most curious thing happens.
Bureaucratic entanglements pile up, trailed by deadlines and mounting expectations. The echoes of the phenomenological approach grow fainter.
The studio, once a space of inquiry, starts to feel like a backlogged office, a cluttered workspace or a factory line. The work is slowly shifting from an act of expression to a transaction, less about what one wants to say, more about what aligns with prevailing discourse, funding priorities, and audience demand. Artistic freedom starts to feel suspiciously regulated. The artist shifts from a visionary to a manager, caught up in the mechanics of production. At some point, one might have to face a troubling thought: maybe this whole thing was a scam all along.
Jean Baudrillard famously declared that contemporary art had become a «conspiracy» that functioned through its own self-perpetuating discourse rather than any meaningful engagement with reality. A well-oiled machine running on its own self-importance. In The Conspiracy of Art (1996), he argued that much of contemporary art exists only to sustain its own market and critical infrastructure, rather than to provoke thought or aesthetic experience. Galleries display it, critics theorize it, collectors invest in it-everyone plays their part, and the system keeps humming along. Meaning turns optional. Well, depending on the right branding-courtesy of the curators.
Turning art-as-optimized-output into her subject, Czech artist Ester Parasková employs repetition not just as a method but as a means of dissection.
Though analog in execution, her work reflects the aesthetics of mechanized production. She approaches her studio the way a factory worker clocks in- dressed for the mess, dragging the raw, chaotic reality of her workspace onto the canvas. Familiar cartoon motifs are copied, fractured, and eroded, exposing the tedium of mechanical labor and the slow death of individuality in a world consumed by mass production. As the epitome of production-line artistry, where animators redraw the same character endlessly, refining each movement through sheer repetition, Disney serves as a perfect example of mechanical labor. Swathes of oil pastel clash with fragmented Disney imagery, stripped of key features and rendered eerily anonymous. By erasing their faces, the work severs them from their consumer-friendly identity, turning them into silent, interchangeable figures, mirroring the depersonalization of both labor and politics.
In Parasková's works, freedom isn't in the linework - it can be found in the color and the movement of the brushstroke. The works operate as structured studies, a deliberate counterpoint to the illusion of expressive spontaneity. Like Foucault's panopticon: a system of self-discipline where control is internalized. Parasková plays within this tension-what appears free is, in fact, calculated, bound by repetition. A quiet reminder that even in art, the supposed site of radical expression, freedom is never absolute; it bends to its own constraints, its own logic of control.
If freedom is partially curated and visual motifs are endlessly recycled, what counts as genuine becomes increasingly uncertain. Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935), reads like a postmortem on art's uniqueness. He argued that as reproducible mediums like film and photography spread, what he called 'aura'-the unique presence of an artwork tied to its time, place, and ritual-began to fade. Images were mass-produced, widely circulated, and increasingly detached from their original context. Reproduction had democratized access, but at a cost: meaning was no longer fixed, and art had shifted from an object of reverence to one of consumption, replication, and political instrumentalization.
Scam operates in the shadow of Benjamin's argument of mechanical reproduction and the loss of an aura. Parasková leans into this loss, deliberately reworking and distorting mass-produced imagery. By methodically redrawing and deconstructing familiar icons, she highlights the uneasy space between repetition and authorship. If Benjamin saw reproduction as the slow death of the aura, Parasková moves beyond the funeral— interrogating the very notion of originality. These images don't function as echoes of something lost but as the raw material of an endlessly self-replicating system. Repetition here is not a failure; it is giving visibility to the mechanism itself.