The alternative title for Sasha Neschastnova’s ‘Sex Thoughts’ series is ‘S@x Through the Eyes of a Woman, without S@x’, and is her take on how people imagine sex, what they want to do with sex, and what is really hiding behind their fantasies. She looks at how, in an increasingly online web of relationships, sex can propel your life forward, play on your popularity and career, but also bring you down. In a world of commodity-market relationships, how much room is left for real thoughts, feelings and images that are not invented and not corrupt? In an age of modern technology and progress we experience the appearance of a fictional life on the internet, but what is hidden behind it all?

Many people ask how to build a real relationship when online romance and reality have become so intertwined. Which life is real and which is fictional? Many of these paintings are about messages that women receive on the internet, Instagram, and dating sites. What are these men trying to say? Why are they doing what they do?

Life on the Internet creates any version of us that we want to be. Like a wonderland, everything can be bought and everything can be sold. Anything is possible. And who we are and what we really want, no one knows. The online world is too often embellished, erasing real life and relationships, mixing everything up into a fictional ideal world. Either sex is too boring, or the internet is too interesting.

Men think that drawing attention to themselves can be done in very strange ways – obscure messages, or a photograph of their most important organ. Sasha helps us wonder what men are counting on when they choose this way of attracting attention to themselves, when it usually looks just stupid. The final paintings in this series reflect men on the internet trying to attract women’s attention with the attributes of their male organs, and what their recipients are likely to think of them.