The artist uses The Arsonists euphemistically to describe figures of nocturnal pyromaniacs as artists hooked on their work. The enigmatic faces and outlines of the arsonists, originally drawn from film frames, then later “from the head,” appear in the light of the fires they have started. The simplest drawing gesture – chalk on a blackboard – unobliging and radically impermanent, meets the destruction of the arson, whose gesture is equally simple, though mercilessly irreversible. Both involve an obsessive fascination with what human hands are capable of doing. The Arsonists series was made shortly after the premiere of Aftermath, a popular film that dealt with the pogrom of Jews in Jedwabne in July 1941, an event which culminated in the torching of a barn with people corralled inside.