Coffee, as a fixed part of the daily grind, is the ideal energy source for capitalism’s global machinery. Profit is incessantly mined from this crucial trading commodity, rooted in colonial infrastructures. Highlighting our insatiable and never-ending thirst, Jana Euler locates what otherwise often gets lost in the tumult of events, interrogating once again the question Where the energy comes from.
Man turns into a coffee machine. In the form of a blank, polished, and steaming coffee robot, the artist idealizes a system driven by achievement, innovation, and expansion. But at the bottom of the coffee cup there is no solution lying in wait. With or without, the stressed dairy cow reaches with gusto for the source of all evil.
By painting coffee beans instead of grinding them, Jana Euler underscores their individuality. As larger than life actors, they confidently stride into relation with their environment, with the other paintings, and with the beholder. This painted encounter generates friction and stimulates a new circular flow of energy.
The female brush experiences this charge of tension. In its role as artist, motif, and tool, the brush freezes into mutual self-referentiality. Painting becomes the object of the image and goes for treatment to the dentist’s office.
The Investment is paradoxical, like the provisional wall that holds the exhibition together.
- Louisa Wombacher