They say the road to hell paved with good intentions.

Why?

Through painting and installation, Janus Straefer circles golden cages, traces when medicine turns to poison, when bliss turns to horror and hope to disappointment.

Using research and psychoanalytic exploration, he ends up performing an existential Janus-faced tightrope walk between longing and despair. 

His process begins with gathering historical and contemporary fragments of imagery as mediums of desire, reaching from fashion and pop culture to landscape and religious painting in order to analyze, compare, and distort them. In doing so, his work is a search in pursuit of orientation in our lived post-digital void

How are we intoxicated by our own idealisations? And how can we, as societies manage to negotiate them again?

Janus Straefers work is an offer to encounter those questions.