Klaudia Januško’s solo exhibition Too Hot to Handle at acb Attachment juxtaposes the dominant representations of women in contemporary video games with cyberfeminist critiques and visual elements inspired by Romantic landscape painting. The thematic foundation of the large-scale oil paintings on display stems partly from the artist’s experiences and documentation gathered during an artistic residency in Iceland last autumn and partly from themes explored in her previous solo and group exhibitions—such as Her Body, Himself, presented at Liget Gallery in the summer of 2023. These works critically examine the hypersexualized body politics surrounding female protagonists in video games (as well as their broader pop-cultural counterparts, including the cyber-femme fatale and the final girl). 

Through this critical lens, Januško’s works seek to expose the objectifying aesthetics of the culturally entrenched male gaze as well as the libidinal economy and psychosocial structures that create and sustain it. A precedent for this approach can be found in one of her earlier video installations, Main Character (video, 2023), which draws inspiration from Martha Rosler’s seminal 1975 feminist performance and video art piece, Semiotics of the Kitchen, a parody of cooking shows. In this work, Januško prepares food using highly ornamented cutting tools reminiscent of the swords wielded by neo-medievalist action heroines. The ingredients, embedded with touch-sensitive sensors, function as sound-generating interfaces. Some of these swords (Begin the Awakening You’ve Always Wanted, stainless steel, wood, 2021) were featured in the group exhibition The Dark Side of the Sun at acb Gallery last summer and have since been acquired by the Irokéz Collection. 

Despite her engagement with multiple genres and media, painting—especially figurative painting with references to classical periods and styles—remains central to Januško’s artistic practice. This seemingly conservative formal approach is, in fact, an aesthetic simulation that reinforces the conceptual content of her works. Through it, she highlights how contemporary video games—particularly those utilizing three-dimensional virtual spaces navigated from the player’s perspective—rely on art history’s characteristic "symbolic forms" (as theorized by Erwin Panofsky) and narrative techniques, such as perspective-driven visual storytelling. A prime example of this critical anachronism is Januško’s painting Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (2023, oil on canvas), a reinterpretation of Caspar David Friedrich’s iconic 1818 work. In her version, however, the dignified, cane-carrying gentleman explorer is replaced by a fantasy game heroine clad in a deeply plunging neckline and strikingly provocative attire, wielding a sword atop a rocky peak. 

In this earlier Friedrich paraphrase, the vast landscape extending into the distance reinforces the Cartesian optical regime, where nature is framed as an obscure, chaotic "other" compared to the clear and distinct (clara et distincta) perception of the rational subject. In contrast, the latest paintings in the Too Hot to Handle series dismantle the hierarchical relationship between protagonist and landscape. Here, the oversized, heroically proportioned female action figures—such as 2B from NieR: Automata, Noelle from Genshin Impact, or Eve from Stellar Blade—appear both as supernatural deities alien to the scenery and as semi-transparent figures dissolving into the majestic Icelandic landscapes of glaciers, volcanoes, and rugged terrain.              The connection between landscape and characters in Januško’s paintings is shaped both by pop-cultural references (blockbuster fantasy films, TV series, and video games) that associate Iceland’s enigmatic geography with supernatural otherness and by the exhibition’s ambiguous title, Too Hot to Handle. This phrase simultaneously alludes to Iceland as a region severely affected by the planetary ecological crisis and to the hypersexualized female video game characters referenced in the works. Thus, the notion of uncontrollability associated with the femme fatale’s demonized feminine traits is linked to the unpredictable, wild, and capricious principle of nature. As art historian László Földényi has observed in relation to Friedrich’s landscapes, “No matter how peaceful the scenery appears, it is still a battleground.” This statement holds even more weight in Januško’s work, as Iceland’s ecology is undergoing radical transformations due to global warming. The island is becoming both more habitable and increasingly uninhabitable, as rising temperatures, melting glaciers, and the greening of previously barren landscapes create new resources for tourism and energy exploitation—developments that, in turn, reshape Iceland’s collective identity and social fabric. Ultimately, Too Hot to Handle can be understood as an ecofeminist critique, where the conquerable, exploitable natural landscape and the hypersexualized female body serve as mutual allegories, exposing the mechanisms of late capitalist and neocolonial desire machines.