25/06/2026
Don’t You Know, Jake?
Francisco de Goya / Ondrej Drescher / Yusuke Furusawa
Verena Kerfin Gallery, Berlin
05 June – 10 July 2026
Work: Ondrej Drescher, Fascinum V – How Jake Tries to Ward Off Reality with Toys, 2026
Black-and-white inkjet print on hardboard, cheap wall paint, cardboard, ink drawings, small round wooden blocks
58 × 78 cm / 22.83 × 30.71 in
Source image: Younis Tirawi / X, 31 October 2024, reposted via landpalestine / Instagram and r/lebanon / Reddit. Original photographer unknown. Location and unit attribution according to the X post: South Lebanon, 202nd Paratroopers Battalion.
In Fascinum V, the surface is deliberately filled with absurd, toy-like elements. The original motif is not calmed down, but reworked in an aggressively contemporary manner, as if violence could be transformed into entertainment, irony and decorative intellectual elevation.
Drescher imitates a certain gesture of contemporary art: one that no longer accuses, but turns images of violence into clever, ironic, seemingly reflective surfaces. Catastrophe is fragmented, overpainted and intellectually neutralised. In the end, everyone is relieved: the perpetrators, the viewers, art itself — and, often enough, the artist.
It is precisely this false lightness that Fascinum V ridicules. The smileys, colours, cardboard pieces and wooden blocks appear childish, almost stupid. But disturbingly, this wall of silliness works. It cuts the image apart, mutilates its reality and makes the actual motif almost disappear.
The work does not only show how violence is represented. It shows how easily violence can be covered, displaced and made invisible through style, irony and aesthetic distraction.
In Don’t You Know, Jake?, this present meets Goya’s Los Desastres de la Guerra. The historical distance collapses. What appears in Goya as the catastrophe of war returns in the images of the present — only with different masks.
