The painting series “Cumming soon” presents enlarged close ups of scenes from hard-core pornographic films. The images are blurry and almost undecipherable. The enlarged details have a topographic character, in which the positive and negative spaces resemble letter shapes.
Bartal attempts to decode the abstract geometric shapes arising from the scenes, and even though the images are blurred and unclear, the shapes still have a violent essence, an aggressive nature, in dialogue with their source. By detaching the images from their sexual context, Bartal explores the form and the content, extracting the clean compositional elements from a product whose original intention was totally different.
The works are drawn using a tissue napkin (an accessory associated with pornography viewing) to spread the charcoal oxide. The paintings recall publicity posters for porn films outside cinemas of disrepute, but the images are blurred. Bartal thus consciously uses the aggressive formalistic aesthetics that characterized the revolutionary movements of the beginning of the twentieth century, especially Russian constructivism.
Bartal confronts the sensational aspect of pornography with aesthetic tools commonly used in design (geometry, typography). The result is a painting series that is both appealing and disturbing at the same time, which succeeds on various levels of interpretation.