Digital Catastrophe. Polyrabbit.Duplicate

The creative duo Polyrabbit.Duplicate (Darius Jaruševičius and Ina Šilina) transfers authorship of films and paintings to an animated character who crafts documentary narratives and brings them to life in various forms of painting. Polyrabbit.Duplicate is the protagonist of the fictional mockumentary animation series Polyrabbit.Duplicate: he is this modern media consumer, untouched by the tangible threats of the media news flow, experiencing the external world only through social networks.

The rabbit is an exceptionally popular animated gags character. In the Polyrabbit.Duplicate series, the animated rabbit character identifies both with important global events and the personal content of social media users. It is reminiscent of Proteus, the shape-shifting early sea god from Greek mythology. In the surface, Polyrabbit.Duplicate remains the same, but his worldview, ideology, and the emotional-physical plasticity of his movements evolve as he encounters various events.

 

Polyrabbit.Duplicate appears to be naïve, trusting and highly influenced by media and pop culture. However, the inherent irony and lightheartedness invert his relationship with what initially seem to be deeply and sensitively experienced media dramas, transforming Polyrabbit.Duplicate into an ephemeral and buffoonish character.

 

The duo’s artistic practice explores the problem of overcoming representation in painting and audiovisual art, raising questions about the corporeality of painting: is the body of painting equivalent to the body of a rectangular canvas?

 

Polyrabbit.Duplicate functions as a singular point of painting with a high density of form, absorbing the illustrativeness, narrativity, and representation of cartoons, social media iconography, caricatures, and cultural figures depicted in the paintings. In the duo’s painterly practice, the relationship between painting and irony plays a central role, defined as creepy figurativism.

 

Polyrabbit.Duplicate aggressively and boldly appropriates shared cartoon imagery, depicting cultural memes and social realities and turning “unique” experiences into comic narratives.

 

In the currant exhibition, Polyrabbit.Duplicate contributes to the vision of recovering the Baltic Curonian identity of the Klaipėda region. The returned Curonians engage in their historically archaic trades within the contemporary Klaipėda cityscape. Similarly, the resurrected Aukštaičiai tribe restores the pre-atomic identity of the city of Visaginas.

 

On the other hand, these paintings cannot be classified as comics, animated illustrations or advertisements. Polyrabbit.Duplicate isolates an emblematic illustrative image, mediated through painting, and unfolds it across a series of repetitions. The expressive and brutal manner of painting absorbs the representational dimension and aids irony that disrupts the fixed identity and meaning of the depicted figures.

 

Catastrophe in the exhibition is perceived as the unpredictable impact of painterly matter on figurative imagery, a concept postulated by philosopher Gilles Deleuze in The Logic of Sensation during his analysis of Francis Bacon’s work. In Polyrabbit.Duplicate practice, digital catastrophe occurs when the animated image in a digital medium collides with carpet surfaces. The projection of the animated image onto the carpet becomes an unreplicable model, which is then reinterpreted in painting by copying it onto a very dense and challenging material: carpet. This process reflects the duo’s ironic perspective on difference and repetition.