Pussy Mandala

The Pussy Mandala collages were made from pictures of porno stars’ vaginas downloaded from the Internet. By means of this peculiar recycling of images, Maurycy Gomulicki has used the found graphic elements to create decorative circular compositions, full of colour and floral motifs. Formally, they draw on symbolic Buddhist diagrams and refer to the sacral connotations this motif bears. The collages, so full of desire, eroticism and reflection on the nature of pleasure, belong to a larger project which the artist calls ‘the culture of ecstasy’.

The vaginas form an opulent dahlia, with their visual sequences changing as in a kaleidoscope. The petals of labia intertwine with hands and fingers with nails painted blue. Boiling down Gomulicki’s concept to a mere fetish for the vagina would be insufficient – he goes beyond its mere adoration and analyses the mechanisms of the object’s perception and fetishisation. By multiplying the images, he reveals his untamed delight of a voyeur, and the elusive beauty of something that stimulates desire and evokes fantasies. In fact, Gomulicki’s work is an invasion of what is seen as unrepresentable and repulsive in a prudish culture. The euphoria of the voyeur and his almost religious ecstasy are combined here with the sublimation of eroticism.

There is a thin line between the concentric mandalas and pornography. Using naturalist photographs, Gomulicki very ably evades literality. The ambiguity of the image stemming from the aesthetics applied in the composition is coupled with an ambiguous approach to a woman. The subject has been pushed out by the object – the object of desire, whose figure is a fragment of a female anatomy objectified by pornography. Gomulicki’s work, however, is far from debauchery, just as his voyeuristic gaze is far from appropriating. He approached the female sexuality in an affirmative manner, led by fascination and delight which changes the way the image is perceived – its naturalism being replaced by aesthetic sophistication.

Izabela Kopania