What Happens in the Dark, Stays in the Dark: Janis Löhrer at MARTINETZ
Janis (Millennial, German) sheds light on gay vulnerability, fantasy, filth, and sensuality.
Paid subscribers may access a personal voice-over of this review here.
Walking Down The Stairs
I had never been downstairs in the gallery’s basement before. It had never been used for shows before, either. Brown bricks peek out from underneath the white wall paint like pores covered in cakey makeup foundation. The lighting is rather weak, unlike in the white cube upstairs. There’s some red LED light tubes installed here and there. But they’re not bright enough to dip the rooms into red. It’s as if the light is too shy to take up any space.
Basement and red light — what could this possibly be if not a club? It’s quiet, though. And not necessarily a safe space — regarding assembly regulations. There’s no windows. No air circulation. I remember so many news headlines of teens dying at illegal parties from carbon monoxide poisoning…
At least Janis added some drawn ventilation shafts and ACs to avoid intoxication. Just grids leading into pure darkness. And for some reason, they started to look like the wooden screens at a Catholic confessional. And then it hit me like Antoine Ego in that Ratatouille (2007) scene where he’s mentally thrown back into his childhood: I found myself watching Season 2, Episode 5 of Fleabag (2016-19) for the first time again: the scene when she talks to the hot priest in the confessional, to which he replies “Kneel” and opens the curtain.
Stripping Down
Was anybody else here? I see random clothes on tiled platforms (Gallerist Petra told me Janis built those platforms for the show). There’s clothes you could randomly lose without noticing, like a baseball cap or gloves. And then there’s other items that seem harder to lose, like a trainer, undies, and socks. Well, okay, I guess you could slip out of a flip-flop while running, but wouldn’t you immediately go back to get it? My bad for my inner Monk freaking out about the details… On the other hand, I’m gagged every time by what people manage to lose on the street sometimes…
There’s a catch: Janis didn’t use the actual items. He rendered them in ceramics glazed in black. Suddenly, the fabric looks stiff and heavy. Shiny as if left to soak in the rain. The socks and undies, though? Crisply cum-dried. The black glaze strips those items of any personal clues. It’s as if the darkness has swallowed all uniqueness, reducing everything to shadows.
Darkness As A Blanket
The walls are lined with two ink drawing series of gay orgies. They are chaotic, entangled clumps of bodies—real, unidealized male bodies in switching dynamics of domination and submission. The Sauna (2024) works are drenched in an intense shade of red that highlights the carnality (yeah, I pulled out a Thesaurus to find this one), the bodily intensity of swollen, pulsing flesh. The Darkroom (2025) series, on the other hand, drowns in fluid blackness. It’s as if Janis focuses on concealing and revealing bodies through shadow and light. Especially Darkroom (2) amazed me: A tight blank slit leads the light into the dark space. The light is so intense that it even pushes through the blackout curtains.
I recently saw a reel (*saying reel instead of TikTok makes me wanna throw up*) by a gay guy talking about the myth of Berghain: What actually determines if you get in or not? He argued that it’s never been about aura or vibes or style. It’s whether you seem like somebody who understands the agreement of the space. That agreement is about respecting the nature of sexual encounters happening there. He explained that initially, darkness and exclusivity were not about creating a cool and edgy vibe, which got inevitably “gentrified” by straight folks. Those were primarily concerns about safety and discretion.
Dropping The Soap
There’s a real shower cabin in that basement. Janis arranged another LED light tube and a black trainer inside. The bathroom-motive brings me back to what I observed with Sarah Kürten’s (Millennial, German) work: Bathrooms are incredibly vulnerable spaces: It’s where people are naked; where hygiene, cultural cleanliness, and repulsion are negotiated.
That’s on the individual scale. But bathrooms are also semi-public spaces with unspoken rules, the most important rule being “Don’t look”. In her memoir My Body (2022), Emily Ratajkowski (Millennial, US-American) dedicates a few pages to her experience at a Korean bath house where people clean and scrub each other vigorously under the silent agreement of not acknowledging each other’s bodies. Memes are dedicated to the “gentlemen’s agreement” of leaving at least one urinal free in between the men’s stalls because “no homo”.
Bathrooms also happen to occupy a curious role in action movie tropes: The bathroom fight scene. Walk with me for a sec. Watch any action movie, I promise you the guys are gonna fight in a filthy public bathroom at some point. Arnold Schwarzenegger fought terrorists with machine guns in a mall bathroom in True Lies (1994), the Russian and the American agent sorted their shit out in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (2015). It goes all the way into satire — Johnny English Reborn (2011) had such a scene as well.
Why am I digressing to action movies? I think cinema’s fascination with this trope stems from the awkward tension between the involuntary physical intimacy while fighting and the mix and mingle of sweat and blood with the substances of the public bathroom that we culturally perceive as filthy.
This awkward tension gets to another level with the bathroom sex trope, where bodily fluids of a different kind meet with the nasty stuff in the public bathroom. Then there’s a whole other dimension if you think about the “dropping the soap” prison talk, which is very much on the edge between forbidden homoerotic intimacy and the sadistic desire to physically overpower and breach consent.
I think that this combination of bodily release and dirty environment, together with the bathroom being part private, part public, is what makes for such a strong historical image of practicing gay sexuality: What is considered societally filthy has no space in public; it gets pushed into the shadows, into the corners, into spaces that are considered just as dirty as what is pushed out of sight. And yet, it looks like those spaces are positively reclaimed or at least renegotiated. Be it in Janis’s work or the photographs of Dean Sameshima (Gen X, US-America). So, to conclude, I’d like to quote what all my girlies have in mind since late November:
Please get on your knees, on this filthy bathroom floor, and suck my dick. — Shane Hollander to Ilya Rozanov in Heated Rivalry (2025), Season 1, Episode 2
Janis Löhrer: Keller was on view from December 5, 2025, until January 17, 2026, at MARTINETZ, Cologne.
MARTINETZ
Moltkestraße 81
50674 Cologne
Website
Instagram: @petramartinetz @janis_loehrer
See you soon!!!
Jennifer
The Gen Z Art Critic
Brilliant connection between the bathroom fight trope and queer spatial politics. Löhrer's ceramic work really nails how material transformation (fabric to glazed clay) mirrors the way marginalized sexuality gets pushed into spaces society already deems "dirty." The Berghain bouncer insight about safety over aesthetics clarifies so much about why these spaces resist coomodification. I've been thinking alot about how contemporary queer art negotiates between documenting historical necessity and celebrating present reclamation, and this exhibition seems to balance both impulses really well.
Great connections made.