Charlottenburg, Berlin
Tony Just
I Am Pleasure
EfremidisWe are happy to present the upcoming solo exhibition I Am Pleasure by Tony Just. Tony Just is showing new works and wall paintings which are accompanied by a poem by Daniel Ward "Tony about three weeks before you asked me to write something for your new painting exhibition we bumped into each other at the doorway of the sexual health clinic in Neukölln — I didn't tell you about it when I came to visit your studio recently but I had actually already written you a poem shortly after running into you descending the stairs and we were both all wrapped up and focused and leaning on our feet but we stopped to say hello and I am writing to you now in much warmer weather, in fact I am in almost the exact antipodean city to you and the paintings and it is easy to have foggy eyes now on what the winter was offering me there — I didn't tell you about the poem because it felt almost too synchronised that I even wrote to you to begin with and that so soon afterwards you would ask me to write a poem to accompany your show anyway — I was in the middle of the 50 day ritual I was telling you about, where I would write automatically once a day on my typewriter, I sped home on the U7 and quickly and wonderfully you were poem 25 and this is how you looked: exiting the clinic again i see tony we both take twice timidly tony you hit me as an angel today alright? you use punctuation as an embrace you look brilliant and i hope you are i couldn't imagine how you used to panic clearly here but you are brave enough to be generous with me and we inhale together for a sec tony you make me a new edition of myself walking down the stairs When I came to see the paintings in your studio I noticed a wound on the same part of our left index fingers: a small fleck of skin that neared a slow amber return to what is perhaps good? the spiral continuing as it does the body was welcoming itself back from the air it rests through, here our body was asking what is good, which is of course what is desired here or does healing ever complete or where do we leave it, as if done much like a painting our minds offer many possible exits/doorways/channels/rhythms for which to be lost but of course as we discussed we have formalized a way to end or close the painting, I'd say we have successfully ritualized the death of paintings on their trip into the market and that you have asked me to write the eulogy — before this happens there is a moment where we can come together in our small twisting together pain-song of arriving to each other flecked where you might say to someone close this is my offering to the god of time — I notice that you let go of your paintings Tony, where did the last work across the window of efremidis go? I'd like to think you listen to the paintings Tony and do as they wish, but I don't know — in your studio there was at one point everything at once shining through the small window at waist height in the corner of the room where much day escaped out this vent of cigarettes and poetry as if life didn't seem to hold itself too well or care about holding itself too well for this day it nursed itself back cradling and I think that is wonderfully daring of the wind to be vulnerable enough to commit to circling the ground and exiting with this bizarre enthusiasm only to return and try something slightly different, again, the movement is much like painting, where we like wind couldn't even tell anyone how we ended up here to execute the something something and it feels so boring to end up at an understanding that life continues Tony but the way I have found painting to function like prayer begs the slow value of continuing, rather of continuing to understand life as a great project of listening — Tony listen I think we could have lived the same life if we didn't but when we touch hands at the end of the ritual I inspect the moment of our shared indentation and I/we entertain the possibility that our lives are now at least close for a moment and there could be no other way than this room and these paintings and my instruction to write but the way it happened lets me wonder that some have called this magnetized before and even I'm sure some have spoken about destiny but I understand from the small amount of time we have spent together that we share an interest in not acknowledging a name for too long because we'd rather keep moving and get to the work we must do which is to suffer and query — during the visit I think on hearsay, how every time something is touched by our hands, depending on the angle you take, there is this nano-gap-between-all-skin-and-material-alike, where when we touch or rather when we think we touch there is in fact this space of the smallest electric brilliance daringly wedged between us, call it our tiny divine darkness of which no love or hate performs but rather separates our intention and leaves us floating in parallel quiet; we hit them, no we don't, you wrangle the canvas but perhaps it was always wrapped, we let them hug us but we don't know if we ever reach and so out of desperation perhaps we understand there to really be only one reach: no noun no object no arrival, but rather a verb called faith; one reach towards everything we will ever/never know, this negative almighty within the microscopic canyon of our togetherness implores us to honor the emptiness in spite of the inevitable acceptance that we will never totally become its expert — but of course still we grab the seasons, the metering, the dancing, the stirring, the calculating, the hammering, the kneeling, the stapling, the grasping, the honoring, the moving of our hard flecked praying hands downward, hands that come fiercely down to wake our circadian earth day with bright quality, with something like pleasure; the blinding flare perpetual of joining each other as hands in the ready public realm of a room marked holy — can I disappear for a minute so that I can be an indeterminate arrival for you sometime soon — it doesn't matter how or where, but we will see each other around — and as all magnets are due the gap never fills long, remains barefooted and smudged along the base, smeared and quietly stood amongst us and crowding our nowhere in molecular jive, in wobbled protest of carnivorous knowledge our surrender to mystery casts a shadow of effulgence that we may rest in from time to time before returning to the pulse — apart from this poem which is a letter which is a poem I haven't been writing all that much in fact rather specifically avoiding it and instead I have directed the unrelenting questions that arrive by living/listening directly at the wall which is the canvas; the pliable island of earth floating and waiting waiting waiting and what I have learnt is that when we paint, where our hand touches the skeins like love!s distance, we surrender in gratitude to be passed into this point of unknowing air, we face that light-headed reality each time we return to the dry board and continue. doubt what? where is your will if you were built within surrender? our feet lead this awkward doing and we know how to let them do that and like feet to the earth or hand to the vacuum wall time too is this gap between things and in that gap we are so often left desperately pondering that arrival of done as if a lover estranged and until then our something somethings bring doubt which brings the thought do we really want to know what works in composition with our body and the bodies we encounter with every movement just so that we can be good, so that we can decompose as an exercise in autonomy and coast in those decided pleasantries? perhaps not. today we wish our desire be undefinable, our arrival be continual almost. and so it is. and we wish that our forward love in the world is incomprehensible. we wish language to fail constantly so that it too will change. and then here we stand at the alter (desk, easel) and wonderfully we couldn't even begin to profess certainty, but rather decide to stand as a doorway. empty man. empty, man. the air pushes through the window and swallows the quiet. we lean forward slightly to perform the tiniest kiss ever along the page of the floor, our hand a hovercraft of patience. later we walk with our spit shoes home, understanding all the ways language fails to define what carries us onward and in our most lonely moments tony we may wish this opaque purpose materializes like money in the bank and into a cupboard full of containers or socks or jackets plenty, our things or our temporary friends or our vices and vitamins, but tony what I am learning is that there is no pleasure quite like painting which like writing and dancing and singing is mostly listening where most of our time is spent in the darkness of waiting which is to say I joyfully surrender to the anticipation in- between the suffering of our indecision, for always comes action like wind through the window diagonally sharp carrying that delicate temporary drug of perseverance, igniting an opportunity of deep love for the world — I wish my life be a painter or a meandering vessel or an open window" —Daniel Ward