White Cube, White Teeth

Gleaming white teeth are an essential element of a winning appearance, radiating health and sometimes also virility. In knowledge of this fact, no small number of people give their teeth some help, either by bleaching them or by having ceramic glued directly onto them. Teeth can also be found in Johannes Bendzulla’s most current set of works, “White Cube White Teeth,” after having become something of a leitmotif for him in recent years. To say that the real focus here is on teeth would be an overstatement, however; instead, the artist’s interest in them is likely down to their omnipresence. After all, Bendzulla has gradually dimmed-down the discursivity of his works in the previous years, turning to a compressed stock of materials that floats freely through his images. There, teeth seem in the first instance to be innocuous and free of any deeper motivic implications. But in addition to their ubiquity, teeth are also pure white, shiny, and crucial to projecting an image of success, which makes sparkling pearly whites the perfect proxies for Bendzulla’s slick digital aesthetic of simulation, which might also be described as an image politics of the facade that constantly thematizes its own superficiality. Anyone who engages more deeply with this aesthetic register will find it has long been characterized by a close dance of asepsis and glitches, in which renderings are used in such a way that they come to slip on their own smoothness. The artist’s dive into the dental therefore seems almost logical, since we perceive asepsis as a deficient outcome when dealing with teeth, such as when the whitening tray is left on for a few minutes too long, or when ceramic veneers display the same mathematical stringency as a picket fence. This motivic densification, which goes hand in hand with a tightening of Bendzulla’s pictorial program, corresponds to a reduction of the presented information. While just a short time ago, one might still have gained the impression that his digital practice – despite all categorial differences – was increasingly leaning toward painting, its playful use of painterly references and mimicked brushwork have subsequently been visibly reduced in favor of a smoothness that is increasingly subordinated to the impression that is to be conveyed. The new images are all appearance, performing themselves, while also inflecting this through their layers: kitchens, bedrooms, living rooms, each from the hand of an interior architect and fully rendered, and for this very reason too cold and generic for even a fruit fly to be able to exist within them. And this is precisely why the works from “White Cube White Teeth” reflect Bendzulla’s program in its purest form – his technophilia and fascination with the seductive appeal of digital imagery, in which everything appears just a little too perfect, too clean, too smooth. And which, with just a little exaggeration, unfolds a comedic potential that is entirely capable of leaving a few scratches on the master signifier of perfection.