Stripper Still Life, oil on canvas, 78x65 inches, 2018.

In this painting, the still life abandons its tranquil tradition to become an inventory of power, artifice, and desire. On the table, objects line up like relics of a hypertrophied masculinity: XL condoms, anabolic steroids, protein supplements, poppers, black gloves, blue pills, a penis pump, a dildo, the skull of a bull. All arranged with the ritual precision of a contemporary altar.

The work forms part of the cycle Syd Krochmalny has developed since the performance Bull Anaconda, in which he embodies Ivan Ulrich, a stripper and sex worker—not as a theatrical role but as a lived identity: a fiction inhabited and expanded through daily life, writing, painting, and sculpture.
In this still life, each object is a prosthesis, a tool, or a promise: means to construct a body-stage and a performative desire. There is no morality or judgment here, only the precise record of a material economy that sustains fantasy. The still life becomes a self-portrait: the absent body is present in its extensions, in the devices that sculpt, amplify, and sell it.

As in a baroque altar, the accumulation is not random: each element is an index of a personal and collective myth, where masculinity is fabricated as an image, a commodity, and a fiction of power. Still Life of a Stripper does not document the intimacy of a character, but the entire apparatus that produces him.