Ornament & Crime

Political para­phrase of the epony­mous essay writ­ten by Adolf Loos in 1908. The idea of com­mu­nism placed in con­trast with the idea of exter­mi­nat­ing orna­ment.
The first ver­sion (white on white) presents mim­ic­ry, a refined way of being attached to the sur­face and ignor­ing propaganda.

It cap­ti­vates through shal­low­ness, the begin­ning of the per­cep­tion of kitsch. In the sec­ond plan, the onion pat­tern becomes a kind of a com­mer­cial war paint.

The heads of Lenin and Gottwald sym­bol­ize the Communist Party con­nec­tions with Russia and the inter­na­tion­al dimen­sion of the com­mu­nist ide­ol­o­gy. Porcelain is open­ly cast in the role of a favourite mate­r­i­al of com­mu­nist apparatchiks.

The onion pat­tern reg­u­lar­ly employed by Maxim Velčovský, each time with a slight­ly dif­fer­ent mean­ing, plays a key part here. For the artist it is a mod­ern clas­sic, a way of medi­at­ing din­ing on porce­lain to the fast-food gen­er­a­tion and a sar­cas­tic memen­to of the bour­geois life style across his­to­ry — but as it is in fact a “mutat­ed” dec­o­ra­tion orig­i­nal­ly of Chinese prove­nance, it is also a for­got­ten man­i­fes­ta­tion of glob­al­iza­tion before globalization.