Essays
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Tales of the Shtetl
My uncle Meyer, a man of artistic talent and a known lover of several women, was ready to be wed. His was to be an arranged marriage to an 18-year-old beauty, Zipporah, from the city of Chełm. He had met her a few times, and then told stories of how wonderful and independent she was.
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The Flask
Hippo Hole, the stuff we drank together with Wojek Kliczka as we worked on our cartoon. The label name (in Russian) read “Potierya” and was the title of a humorous tale by Danil Charms. And so, we did get a good laugh at that one.
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Scores for humans to play
If Mr. Kasprzyk was asked how to paint a good picture, he would not be able to give an answer, which is understandable, but at the same time, he would tell you to listen to a good music, as this is very helpful while painting.
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Windows on the world. Why do you care so much?
On September 11th, 2001 when I was on my way to the post office with a bag full of invitations for Dwurnik’s exhibition opening I took a photo of myself as a memento. A couple of hours later it was obvious that I would remember this Tuesday forever anyway.
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Dariusz Mlącki's objects impossible
I would describe Dariusz Mlącki as a painter who plays on the most subtle tones and values. Even on a small piece of painted area, a Bach-like play of sounds is set and occurs. The paint is applied with extraordinary tenderness.
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Thoughtfulness
Thoughtfulness is the essence of these paintings. All people, animals, and even objects seem to be thoughtful and dreamy. It’s not tiredness or laziness, but playing with time that is realistically unrealistic.
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The gallery
Among Katarzyna Jędrysik-Castellini’s paintings, there is one which is particularly close to me: the one displaying a church’s gallery. Looking at it, I return with my thoughts and my heart to Tuscany, to the cloisters’ galleries, whose walls resound with an old singing of psalms, well forgotten by today.
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Freedom to people and animals
Agnieszka’s photos present little revelations of miraculousness? wonderfulness as well as moments when reality suddenly shows its diabolical face. Behold the cracks in the banal shell of everyday, through which the anarchic multitude of parallel meanings leaks out, the total, terrifying "freedom to people and animals".
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Vase Number 1
Vases are closest to the definition of a painting according to the Polish Colourists. However, Pala saturates them with emotions which do not normally go with the art of flower arrangement. His vases are rudimentary, archaic, brutal. They bear witness both to the struggle with material, so precious to Colourists, and to the painters unfailing knack for finding a colouristic punchline.
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The Downfall of the Sorcerer Hermogenes by Luca d'Ussula
In his monumental monograph, Früh-Renaissance der Italienischer Malerei (Basel, 1895) Bürckberg says that as a result of conflict between the houses of Ghirerdini and Tommasi families, the Ghirerdini grave chapel was plundered by troops led by the famous condottiere, Sigismondo Malabraccio, who then sold the stolen altar to the cardinal Pompeo Caraffa, later to become Pope Hadrian VI.
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Bath with the Painting
Martyna Merkel is looking at the world. She observes, contemplates, lives. The painting is the result of her gaze, attention, sensitivity and the way she synthesises impressions on canvas. Elements of descriptiveness disappear in favour of concise construction of forms merely suggesting objectivity.
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A fleeting love for things mundane
Pure and elaborately arranged still lives by Tomek Karabowicz evoke associations with the 17th-century Dutch painting, at first glance. This is particularly true about those recent ones, with glass vessels, harmony, and absolute unity of all elements, bringing to mind the Breakfast scenes by Willem Claesz Heda.
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On The Revolutions of Colours
Abstract art has been one of the most characteristic cultural phenomena of the twentieth century. Its beginnings - historically quite young - date back to the distant epoch when Europe was just at the threshold of grand cultural changes, war cataclysms and bloody dictatorships.
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Beautiful times
What good can come from the collaboration between an artist and coroporate business? Apart from the obvious benefit of a regular salary, of course. The case of Przemek Truściński may be enlightening.
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Not a Fairy Tale
The stories that happen on the canvas are at times chilling: naked people, probably children, with their heads enveloped by fire, like burning torches. Did their hair get caught in an innocent and careless game with matches, or did someone set it on fire in an act of sadism, punishment, revenge, stupidity?
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Aeroplane, angel, wolf, bicycle
In the twentieth century every association had the weight of a symbol, or maybe its lack of weight; we lived surrounded by rank-and-file associations which we only now, posthumously, award medals and include in a roll of honour.
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The Divine Flower
Tulip used to be a flower triggering big passions, and it was most willingly portrayed in visual art. Tulip as the subject of painting was born almost simultaneously with a delight for the plant itself. Wild tulips – the ancestors of those innumerable garden varieties of today – appear on the vast areas of the Orient: from Turkey, through Armenia, Turkmenia, up to Pamir and Tien Shan mountains.
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Silver
The electric scalpel slid gently over the girl’s back. Even with a local anaesthetic, the patient would feel the cut as nothing more than a caress. But now, she was in a deep sleep. She had to be so they could do what they wanted.
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Does Koza do it with dogs?
A gun aiming at a girl. A brunette in a red dress and slippers cocks her head flirtatiously and confesses: "I was a rich man’s plaything". The gun fires; a bubble comes out saying POP!
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To build form through colour
Sparkles of light glittered in the crystal panes; in coral groves, goldfish and jellyfish swam, touching each other with their mouths, fins, slippery tails; crabs and turtles stared with huge eyes; emerald fields of seaweeds were iridescent with the many-coloured starfish and urchins who had their home among them, bands of yellow sponges hung from steep rocks...
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The Charm of Life
Abandoned routine transformed into an affirmation of everyday life: the last sip of coffee in a coffee cup is a memory of the morning, a map – an echo of a simple stroll or perhaps a longer journey. Jola Wagner not only sees, but also perceives.
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The architecture of Utopia
Maja Kiesner was brought up in the Warsaw district of Targówek, living in a thirteen-storey block of flats. She could see another such thirteen-storied block through her second-floor window.
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A physician’s viewpoint
I remember that when I was a medicine student, my classmates and I dissected a human limb: I carefully separated skin from tissue with a scalpel to reveal a nerve, a vein or an artery. I took out a human heart from a container and carried it in my hands like a dead nestling.
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Beauty Forced Itself In
First of all – color. For Darek Pala, this is a priority, a starting point in his thinking about a painting and his painting method. The form and style of his works keep changing – shifting from comical scenes to the simplicity of singular motifs, from a multiplicity of ornaments to synthesis, from elaborate fiction to focus, even to the contemplation of still nature. One thing remains constant: the decisive of role of color.
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In the shadow of the South
No doubt, for Katarzyna Jędrysik-Castellini, the painting tradition is very important. With her eyes fixed on this tradition, she paints her paintings which she practically makes timeless in a very thoughtful manner, as if those scenes could be happening at any time, always, or, for ages now. The Mediterranean climate with which those canvases emanate, as do the scenes having become their subjects, is definitely beneficial to it.
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City-diaries
If the history of architecture can be compared to a “collection of fiction”, because every new interpretation idealizes our knowledge regarding the past, then Jolanta Wagner’s works “The History of Cities” always viewed from afar, from a distance that lifts us literally, mocks the very laws of optics, in an inverted order.
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Everyone has their "little town"
The lying figure of a beautiful woman is another standard of European art, exploited by the greatest masters from Titian to Manet, later to become a visual cliché. Łydżba is again attracted to a banal theme from the popular imagination of a small town.
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Postcards from life
Cristiano Piccinini’s paintings always have their beginning in a stranger’s photograph, in someone else’s experience. He does not come up with the subjects himself; he draws them from photographs taken by other people.
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Naked concentration
The painter we are writing about is immodestly young. Talent and youth are always a disquieting combination in art: too much tender attention bestowed on them may be dangerous for a young artist. Or at least that’s the general notion, and general notions are sometimes correct.
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The Painter And The Girls
Biała Podlaska: the provinces, provincial scenery and objects; a coverlet spread over a cheap sofa bed, curtains at the windows, grass in front of a barn. Adam Korszun returned here with a degree in painting after completing his studies at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts.
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The Weaving of a Painting
The work on the canvas, the subsequent stages of creation may remind one of a weaver’s work – the warp threads are hidden under a multicoloured weft, and a weft’s thread of a colour weaves the warp only within this colour’s swathe. Zofia Matuszczyk-Cyganska’s oil paintings are like a pattern woven from multicoloured threads.
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Culture of Anger
Koza can be described using the slightly old-fashioned term of a truly renaissance artist for he is involved with several different types of art. From the entirely obvious such as painting to video, animated films, as well as poetry and comics.
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Two drawings
I like to stop in front of these pictures. I have a few at home which have to be committed to memory again and again, because they keep slipping out, with their mysterious, unobvious or perverse motifs, with the provocative tension between the narrative they contain and the form.
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A Room With A View
Landscapes by Adam Patrzyk are just like travel memories for so many of us. ‘People look at my paintings and find there the places they once visited,’ explains the artist. ‘They say: Oh! Look, it’s the streets of Padova, houses in Siena, a square in Jerusalem.’ He finds this quite amusing since all his landscapes are fictitious. Adam is not very keen on travelling. For him the best place to be is his atelier in his hometown, Częstochowa.
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A private history of the war
The wartime photographs of a certain Jan Kotik, the Austrian-Hungarian subject we don’t know much about, the First World War goes on beyond the frame – noiselessly and bloodlessly.
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Martyna Merkel’s Vision
Early-spring is my favourite season of the year. You can feel the scent of departing winter in the air and see the upcoming spring in the shy rays of sun. I think about Botticelli then. About his Primavera, Venus and Judith. About spring being a woman.
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The Journal Written with Images or Enigma
Everyday life consists of a list of errands: a car battery, a dentist appointment, mowing the lawn. The kids’ English class, coffee, tea. Lemons, rolls, challah. Medical tests, a visit to the post office or bank, a newspaper. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, roof tiles, an old film. And round and round it goes.
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Bathtime with Blake
Among my many quirks, the most important is that I always took baths with William Blake. As far as the works I chose are concerned, it varied. Most often, I think, it was Milton. Milton was pure art, literally.
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The Art of Storytelling
Marco Polo, when telling Kublay-khan of distant - and maybe non-existent - cities, each time tried to create, for the listener’s benefit, something concrete, to give form to the “city without shape or figure”, fill it with described reality, describe its situation in space and time as well as in human desires and words.
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Eyes Wide Open. A Self-portrait in an Interior
When I first saw Aleksandra Waliszewska’s self-portraits eight years ago, her early student work, painted on tattered pieces of cardboard, it felt like blowing dust off a buried treasure. Like an archeologist at Fayum, I was sweeping the sand aside to dig up the portraits.
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Ciro Beltrán as a painter
Ciro Beltrán represents the young generation of contemporary Chilean painters. In the latter half of 1980’s, he studied painting in Higher School of Arts, University of Santiago; in 1995-1998, he attended painting classes at the Kunstakademie of Düsseldorf, Germany. This is probably the reason for why his painting appears equally strongly inspired by South-American and European sources.
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Meetings with Aśka
In June 2012, in ZPAP [Association of Polish Artists and Designers] Gallery at Koński Kierat in Szczecin, I met Asia at an exhibition of her works and an artistic event named “The Act of Creation II”. The exhibition was also presented in May 2014 in the Art Gallery Zamek in Szczecinek, almost in the same form, under the name “The Act of Creation III”.
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Once you have sat beside me and we can whisper
Once you have sat beside me and we can whisper, I shall say: I didn’t know you can fold a sheet of paper into an envelope. I didn’t know you feel lonely once in a while.
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Camouflage
If painting – a gesture of hand and the rest of the whole enterprise – just like handwriting represents man’s soul, from Radek’s paintings, even without knowing him personally, I can read that he is a guy exceptionally sensitive to beauty, independent. A non-conformist, but in search of harmony in authority. Selective and precise in defining what he likes. He thinks timelessly. For him the lack of precise specification means freedom.
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Boring postcards or factory areas. In the margin of Maria Kiesner’s exhibition
Maria Kiesner paints non-existent cities and landscapes – if you consider a cityscape veduta as such. Their archetypes are usually old postcards, a stretch of street that is long-forgotten or has been altered beyond any recognition, a corner post office building, steelworks that used to be modern at the beginning of the 20th century – the focus is always on the whole thing, not details.
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Colourful geometry of the eye
As is known, there’s no geometry of the eye. What Małgorzata Jastrzębska paints is something I’m inclined to call a ‘geometry of the eye’ all the same.
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The complementarity of contradictions
For a long time, it has been maintained, that all key attempts in 20th century art have already been made and realized during the era of early modernism while what has remained is only an epigonist repetition or at best an eclectic variation of those attempts.
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Our bodies, our lives
What might happen if a young girl decides to write down what’s important for her? And what if those things mainly include sex and her own naked body? "When painting, I’m getting even with my corporality, I want to look closer at myself", says Agnieszka Sandomierz. Is there anyone else actually willing to take a look at her intimacy?
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A colourful tessera
Painting does not have to tell stories or take pictures; its objectives are deeper and purer: it gives you an opportunity to express yourself personally.
Zofia Matuszczyk-Cygańska
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A Dried Lake and Confusions of Young Karabowicz
A Dried Lake is a title of Tomek Karabowicz’s painting. The real dried lake is in Karczunek, the artist’s home village located in eastern Poland. I was shown this picturesque wilderness when I visited him in summer.
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Uniting expression
She’s a sculptor for whom the human body is a set of solids which, in spite of changing configurations, never cease to be solids.
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Precision of Contemplation
Andrzej Sadowski’s study time at the State Art School in Łódź (today Strzemiński Academy of Art Łódź) ensued under the sign of geometric abstraction. By then, professors painting with the help of a ruler were considered to be “artistic gods”, as malicious comments put it. But what can an artist do with geometric abstraction if he possesses a realist’s soul and lives in a period still overshadowed by socialist realism?
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A tulip-like organ: calyx, the omnivorous creature
A tulip-like organ: calyx, the omnivorous creature
Unclenched, unseemly
Deckled and cool in the outside
Compact and warm inside
Don’t you even dare touch in there!
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Darek Pala. Paintings
Darek Pala. Paintings combines traits of an art-critical work with threads of an emotionally imbued story of the life and creative work of this most en-vogue painter of the Warsaw of 1990s, whose art serves as the best evidence of the style and taste of the Polish age of ‘emerging capitalism’.
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Design and art
A collection of design classics – Utrecht armchairs by Gerrit Riteveld from the 30’s, a light shelf by Franco Albini from the 50’s, and a contemporary low buffet by Piero Lissoni. A well-balanced Dutch construction and Italian airiness are united by Pollock-style painting by Edward Dwurnik.
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A painter from the foothills of the Jasna Góra Monastery
Let me take you for a walk around Częstochowa. My itinerary includes a stroll down the streets of 7 Kamienic, Św. Barbary and Wieluńska. We are in the vicinity of the Jasna Góra Monastery, in the very heart of the pilgrimage centre. The outline of the monastery, with its soaring steeple, towers over the surrounding area, the parks and the little alleys full of shops and stalls with devotional articles.
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Poeta scribit
Thoughts locked in on paper transmigrate like souls imprisoned in bodies, to finally perceive ecstasy. You may get the impression that this fiery wheel spins forever. You stand in line for rapture, like a libertine for another orgasm.
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The sentimental side of the world of imagination
When someone stands in front of a mirror, they usually concentrate on their own reflection, while the rest - the background - escapes their attention. We see a lonely figure extracted from the blurred reality behind its back.
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Stop-frames of Sensitivity
I think I first saw Katarzyna Karpowicz’s paintings in 2015. A friend sent me a link to her portfolio at the time with an almost banal, standard question: ‘What do you think?
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Dreams, desires...
When I watch Beata Murawska's drawings, my memory suggests to me, as a background image, the Sleeping Gypsy by Henri ''Publican' Rousseau, Giorgione's, Venus Asleep, or the Venus with a necklace by Maillol. Venus - that Old-Italian goddess of spring and gardens, who was later on to be identified with the Greek Aphrodite; the one whose cult got Hellenised, the goddess of spring and vegetation being turned into the one of love.
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Touch
Desire, ecstasy, and suffering are the strongest moments when you become aware of your carnality, the feeling of physicality. In Magdalena Sawicka’s drawings, the physicality is present in the trickles of semen on the lips, a turgid penis, wet stains on girls’ panties, cut and bruised hands and tearful faces.
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Briefly on Darek Mlącki
His art is clearly contemplative in nature. Mlącki paints on canvas, timber boards, cork sheets. He makes sculpted objects using a string, or makes spatial, ‘illusive’ painting objects.
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Abstract or Concrete? On Łukasz Majcherowicz’s Painting
Geometry for painting. Painting dabbling in geometry for fun. The world compiled with mathematical bricks is the fun.
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Lurking, frozen. About the newest paintings by Joanna Mieszko-Nita
If you took the whole colour out of Nikifor’s watercolours, you would be left, as it turns out, with exactly half of his artistic result. According to other “calculations”, one part has already been taken by Edward Dwurnik, therefore, this would mean half of the remaining two thirds…
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Report from the Last Judgement
Leszek models his figures with clay and often dresses them in his own shirts. He inserts cigarette butts into their mouths, and uses a lipstick in order to add colour. His sculptures are not monoliths of a durability devised to last for centuries. Humanity is not made of bronze, it is conceived out of cheap materials. Clay which usually serves sculptors for making bozzettos, i.e. ‘sketches’, appears here as the final material. For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.
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The Nearness of Miniatures
The miniature is a ruse – it relieves some of the responsibility, makes the composition of the painting easier, but in return, it offers intimacy.
It works both ways – it shortens the distance, since it is like a whisper, and it diminishes responsibility, since it’s so very, very small...
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Crevices of Colour
After all, nothing is so liberating, both for the artist and the viewer, as abstraction. Yes, it has roots in reality, and Sebastian Skoczylas’ paintings were also created in the process of recording reality and then synthesising it, subordinating it to the framework of composition, and now it moves more and more towards creating objects.
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The Durability of Things
A painting exists physically, but it is generally considered to be a different kind of object from others known to us from everyday experience, even if it represents the most ordinary things. "Although canvas and paints (...) belong to the world, the painter takes them out from among things: because he has chosen them and arranged them according to a secret(...)". To us, three words are significant in this quotation: chose, arranged, secret.
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To see the juicy side of life
It seems that time in Kokoryn's paintings is as still as a summer afternoon, as still as when our memories take on the guise of a sign. Events change their nature to become a graphic form whose significance increases with each experience, each sight, and each event.
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The world consoled
If we accept Valery’s words that truth and life are disorder, admitting that art is a search for order is just one step further.
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Derision and Sacrum
I believe that the supreme feature of all shown sculptures is the prevailing ordinariness of the male. Sociologically, it is mockery - a brute derides a gentleman, his marble interiors and highly polished brass. Philosophically, it is liberation of a man from the pseudo-harmony of the world, which is supposedly ruled by the Creator and in fact, by supranational businessmen.
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An Enfilade
The boundaries between memories and imagination were obliterated ages ago. Actually, how would it be possible for him to remember the suite of rooms? Maybe it was he himself who had created the history of the house by depicting it in every single subsequent painting. Maybe it had become so coherent, logical and plausible that he believed it himself because he had always wanted to do so.
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An irrational joy of painting
Oh, so the world does exist after all. There is the market square in Lowicz and the parish church in Klimontów. Dabrówka exists, and even Warsaw, although I couldn’t imagine until now, exists too. And I thought everything had disappeared.
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Eschatology of greyness
Soon your world will be shattered. The only greyness you’ll see will be that of the ashes of the burned world. A world without colours, without deities raising everything that is secular to the rank of sanctity, without elements.
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Untamed Vitality
If the future of storytelling is immersion and direct experience, Daniel Zarewicz’s works beat what technology can offer hands down. They’re like taking ayahuasca while wearing a VR helmet – a frenetic trip leading to enlightenment, only without the vomiting.
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Being there: a disturbing thing
It is a rare phenomenon that we deal with paintings which make us reflect on time and ‘being there’, or ‘lasting there’, in such an unexpected manner. Actually, it seems to me that to paint a ‘being/lasting somewhere’, ‘as it is’, is merely impossible. However, there is something to it in Adam Patrzyk’s paintings.
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The Goldfish and The Glass Ball
Aquaria are excellent dream containers. Protected by a wall of glass or perspex, various biotopes can drift immersed in the oily element: sandy lagoon banks strewn with colourful shells, coral reefs, the meanders of the Ucayali – worlds enclosed in glass, a safe medium for our dreams.
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SALIGIA, or Seven Quite Serious Issues
Years ago, while reading Czesław Miłosz’s essay collection The Garden of Science, I came across a chapter titled ‘SALIGIA’. I didn’t know the word, so I dove in eagerly, and it turned out that it was a word from the Middle Ages, made up by the first letters of the seven capital sins.
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Study of light
It is a house unlike any other. Or rather, it is three houses in one, joined by a common façade. Large windows – from the garden, and from the front, a row of small windows, like in a factory.
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Diary
I was dreaming of a driver carrying one my painting with a pair of white gloves on his hands. In the afternoon, I get seated and start the operation of rescuing a damaged canvass. No-one, however, can possibly guarantee me that, once I have brushed one life over, the other one will expectedly be a better one.
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Stories without time or place
The muscular human figures from Deja's prints come into daylight in his paintings. The muscles gain colours - reds and browns.
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Things visible
Seeing things as they are. Such a task is easy to conceive, almost natural, for it boils down to seeing with one’s own eyes whatever appears in front of them. The whole thing, however, is entirely different when it comes to these things being seen by a painter, just in order for him or her to paint them instantly afterwards.
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A grey wolf, some pigeons, and a jet plane
Is painting still capable of telling any narrative any more? Past the silent monochrome pictures, isn’t a story told by a painting an anachronism? I guess, it is. But on the other hand, even a lonely light-blue, or an explosive red, do happen to be talkative.
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I had a dream
I dreamt about a wild animal and it’s hard to say if it is good or evil. It is both, unpredictable. So far it’s been calm, it’s let me snuggle in its warm side and it’s lulled me to sleep with its peaceful, rhythmic breath. It’s been rocking and soothing me like that for quite a while. For years.
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A sign in a space
In Kalina Horoń’s paintings, we find echoes of our own intuitive scribbles, traces of signs from the walls of city buildings, gates, bridges and viaducts. We let the whirl of colours and childish symbols sweep us away.
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Storyboards
I have decided to show Przemek Truściński’s commercial storyboards (panels of rough sketches outlining the scene sequence), as it is the latest art form and a documentary of a Polish dream of prosperity.
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Men’s Secrects
Tomasz looks for male models delighting with their innocence. He gets attracted by faces of youths free of anxieties of the mature age. Their innocence is at times emphasised by the artists by transparent glass objects set at the background. He would compare his half-naked characters to blooming flowers due to wilt soon. They are really, albeit ephemerally, powerful.
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Eclipses
They meet under a sky so menacing that there is no doubt that it foretells extinction, it is a sky of apocalypse, a sky of the end of the world, an inevitable sky.
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A Calculator
You stroked me through my clothes, through my vest and my panties. Carefully and gently, to make sure you wouldn’t get to see the blood, to make sure the blood would not splash right onto your face. Or onto your groomed hands with filed nails. And you were thinking to yourself: Come on; give me a blowjob and go.
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Equilibrium of greyness
To her home in India she takes photographs of old factories, devastated conveyor belts in Lower Silesia, all grey and wasted by time. Since she can remember she has always liked spending her time in those godforsaken places that are doomed to a slow decay and eventual death.
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Solitaire – a lonely tree
Solitaire – a lonely tree and a painting theme, and a multitude of interpretations and possibilities to ‘read’ the painting. It may be the tree of life, the tree of good and bad news. It all depends on the manner in which it is presented – as the symbol of rebirth, or sin and decay.
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Il Chiostro
I have recently come to a conclusion that my pointless afternoon walks have to them a subconscious meaning which is hidden somewhere deep down there. Completely unwittingly, I would of a sudden come across persons, things, buildings, situations which add up a meaning to my reflections.
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Early in the morning
Early in the morning of June 4, 1966, Edward Dwurnik got off a train at the platform of the railway station at Łowicz. He was not wasting his time, as the first drawings were made after only thirty minutes.
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A painter among painters
Krzysztof Kokoryn did not know about his calling as a painter at the very outset. Originally, he was sure he was going to become a musician. He had even had some achievements in the field of music. But, he eventually decided to try and take his entrance exam for the Fine Arts Academy.
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Beyond Words
The world of Piotr Bukowski’s paintings is based on imagination, rich in symbolic contents that could not be conveyed by the language of literature. To be brought to life they require images.
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Fiery
I’m going to see Kasia, I said, and I put on a red jumper. I left the black one, freshly laundered, on a chair. Leaving the house, I stopped between the holly and the rowan. When I got there, to the old house in the centre of Krakow, a house build around internal workshops, Kasia came downstairs to get me. So I wouldn’t get lost.
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Mothers
It’s not easy to pray and, therefore, people have those prayer wheels, rosaries and carpets that facilitate the praying act in a physical, mechanical way, without engaging the mind and the heart too much. In our culture we are, however, used to praying to someone, to have an illusion of contact with the Person that is ‘listening’ and reacting in some way.
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It won’t hurt
It’s a tough job, evacuating ten billion people to outside the solar system. The flight takes twenty years, so what’s the point of taking those who won’t live that long anyway? Some folks forged birth certificates, offered bribes. Then the rumour spread that if they catch you the crew push you out into space, without a suit. A horrible death.
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Suspended Reality
The mainstream, superhero type of comic is a medium in which great attention was paid to the craftsmanship, communicativeness, legibility and precise narration.
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Bellies
This is how it all started: no job, no girlfriend, neither parents nor buddies, only a row of monitors, three computers, radios, listening watch. I had everything, down in my basement. I tapped the city security and police surveillance cameras. I became the eye and the conscience of the city.
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In the Studio
Murawska is the best solution for depression or a relationship crisis. She’s an artist riding the wave of sensuality. Her art is a pure affirmation of life, primal nakedness and eroticism untainted by civilisation. Each pair of lovers resembles Adam and Eve, each tulip field – the Garden of Eden. A painting instead of an apple? The serpent of temptation has abandoned his role.
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Intermingling
White canvass, smooth and stretched. Some colourful geometric shapes against the whiteness. Occasionally, the rigorous geometry is soothed by more biomorphic forms – such as orderly sea waves, a colourful multiplied shadow of a four-leaf clover.
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A pseudo-Baroque thriller
At first glance these are drawings from the museum portfolio of the old masters. Julia Medyńska draws on the achievements of her great predecessors with her usual flair and irreverence. She reaches for the stylistic means and historical costumes of past eras. She uses conté crayons, oil paints, and pencils. Beneath the historicising costumes, chilling scenes are played out, a baroque thriller.
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The Every-Day Life
I draw all the time, almost with no break. Drawing is my every-day life. Drawings are records of this life. When drawing, I use my private history, experiences of every-day life. I am saving my life and creating a kind of documentary: diaries, calendars, books, maps…notes of every-day things. Things objectively tiny and of small importance, important for me only.
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Out of the box
Humans are born free and unconstrained. Then, due to bans and superstitions, shaped by parents and professors we build a wall around ourselves. Who closes us in the box of restrictions - others or ourselves?
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Apocrypha
In the fourth year of his reign, in the year 658 since the founding of the city, the illustrious Prince Atti-Bus’Dinah, eighteen years old at the time, summoned the Greek architect Eleucos of Naxos to the palace and instructed him to extend the south wing, from the Gryphon Courtyard to the orchards of Hermites.
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On Adam Patrzyk
Our fascination with the world portrayed by Adam Patrzyk comes quickly, and it brings with it a question: Should we be wary of these places, or should we be drawn to them? This is magical painting, which means that it arouses a vague desire to enter the paintings, to reside in their spaces, without knowing—not right away—whether for good or ill. As is often the case, the first thing we experience is a sense of déjà vu: we see what, tentatively, we already know has been painted and told by others before.
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There's no-one there
"There’s no-one there". This phrase reappears like a song chorus across a few hundred pages of Georges Perec’s novel La Vie mode d’emploi [Life. Instructions for use]. Not infrequently, apartments furnished with objects, whose detailed descriptions can be found there, appear empty. Or perhaps, not really empty: there’s a plenty of objects indeed, but – there’s no-one.
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The governor is gone
The governor is gone. The last clerks are leaving official buildings, carrying leather briefcases with an embossed coat of arms and a motto in letters of gold. The coachmen are getting onto the boxes.
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Woman-Bull
They told me – forget your tears, you have a son, a beautiful torero. He’s beautiful, he’s strong, they said as he passed from hand to hand.
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The Candidates
Faces of women – innocent, perverse, dreamy. Their eyes, cheeks, and mouths fill and burst small paintings. Adam Korszun has been painting portraits, filled with tension and anxiety, for years. They are his angels and demons.
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Scratched out with an old biro
A friend of mine whom I had shown Janek Koza’s comics said: "You know, that kind of stuff used to be seen on a train toilet wall scratched out with an old biro!"
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The war could not fit in those frames
We do not know much about Jan Kotik, the man who took those photos. He was a soldier, he had a camera with him, and, by recording individual pictures on the glass film, he was building a war narrative. The main characters were soldiers of the Austrian-Hungarian army, somewhere in the Monarchy’s outskirts during World War 1, and the civilians, almost always accompanied by soldiers
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Majcherowicz’s Colorful Lines
Most of small-sized paintings created by Łukasz Majcherowicz within the last several years look abstract at the first sight. Most of them represent outlines of rectangles formed by lines which are sometimes transformed into wider bands and which seem effortless but, at the same time, quite clear when it comes to the painter’s intentions.
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Only a picture
This time, there are no cities and towns, panoramas and views, people and figures; only the purest abstraction, frantic and splashed with the colours of the rainbow.
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Contemporary Baroque
Julia Medyńska has complete control over her painting matter, despite giving it infinite freedom and lightness. Perhaps the word irreverence, or even flippancy, could be applied here. This is what I feel when I look at these otherwise very diverse but always recognisable images of hers.
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The superhuman power of colours
"Once upon a time, paintings came up to me in a dream, paintings that I wanted to paint: the ones imbued with light", Anna Podlewska tells us her story. "I remembered that dream, although I cannot remember what they looked like. One thing was for sure, though: in my dream, a painting appeared that was being built not with a form, or texture, but with light."
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Girls
People tend not to understand Adam, some even call him ‘lustful, disgusting’. But I can see chastity and subtlety in his painted works. Of course they are sensual, but never vulgar.
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Inner Masks of His Soul
The only definite thing we can say about a skull is that it is just a residuum, a remainder of a live body that became a corpse and was irrevocably reduced to ashes. That is it. Nothing more.
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Paintings that Are Musical in Spirit
Painting music is reconciling the impossible and yet great many artists have been trying to cope with the utopian task since a very long time ago. Music is immaterial and the plastic arts exist only in the material.
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Laboratory of the Internal Detox
Łukasz Majcherowicz’s workshop at the Warsaw Academy (of Fine Arts) has a genius loci. The corridor is filled up with students and the buzz of voices but there, behind the closed doors, is silence. One can loose his/hers sense of place and time.
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An I who is Another
A horse - the archetypal symbol of male sexuality, a phallic symbol - painted by a woman, becomes her signature, the Red Mare, Saranyu, who - as in the latest picture Follow your dreams literally, not just in the imagination, reaches dreams and leaps at full gallop from one continent to another.
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The world like a flower
Flowers have remained. At an earlier stage, there were also other themes of Beata Murawska's paintings, yet in time, they have disappeared, and flowers have taken precedence. Their scales are different; sometimes, their sizes can be plainly monstrous, but they do not trigger panic: on the contrary, they seem to be attracting into the depths of the paintings, particularly when the latter's format is so large.
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Death. Between Heroism, Crime and Sickness
The most frequently quoted example of the suicide perceived as heroism is the Japanese kamikaze pilots, who during World War II performed desperate suicidal attacks on American targets.
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Knowing
The photographer is standing on the pier or on the shore. On this shore or that shore. The three people in the boat are bidding him farewell, or greeting him.
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Greyness in the tone of Vanitas
We wear it under our skin, which is plausibly the most fascinating phenomenon in these circumstances: we are a constant and continuously recurring, live symbol of our own transience, the closest and handiest exemplum of the situation. We never part with it, and if we eventually do, it means we cease to exist...
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Porcelain doll
It was an old apartment in Krakow, with dark brown, heavy, coffin-like furniture. Some of the things were piled up in the central part of the room, like sawdust pulled out of an old doll.
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Film
I know how it looks. A young woman, sitting at a restaurant table. Too young to sit in a restaurant alone. Probably waiting for someone. Yes, I’m waiting.
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The beauty of the past
Bogna Gniazdowska has found her original method of how to paint the Past. She practices an interesting variety of historical painting. What are all those numerous portraits, forming a panorama of the past, after all? What are those properties appearing on the paintings?
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Inside-outside
Mlacki believes that "transforming paint into colour, colour into light, light into space, space into meaning is a never-ending desire to achieve a harmony, co-sounding, consonance, a perfect form".
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Katarzyna’s Memorial Book
A kind of symbolic and almost unreal Jewish town, probably located somewhere in eastern Europe, appears in the paintings. It could be Marc Chagall’s Liozna, Bruno Schulz’s Drohobych, or even Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Leoncin. However, I know that this is Szczebrzeszyn.
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Parallel ways
A mobile network tower ruins the view from the window. They installed it here – in the middle of nowhere – not long ago. It’s ugly, but half of Łódź has got a better signal now.
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Ciro Beltrán: perseverance to be an artist
When an object is in motion, that is, does not have a permanent location, it searches through space for a place where it could become an important entity. With Ciro Beltrán, such space is his work, being an artist, and the perseverance to be one.
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The Street
Alas, this is where we would live, where we would shout and burn tyres. This is where we would die, without a complaint, from a weltschmertz – a sentimental pessimism woken up by the overdose of cheap booze.
