MMVI

The title of this exhibition is a number. MMVI in Roman numerals stands for the year 2006. Although 2006 is the date of creation of all the paintings presented at this exhibition, indifference of their creator toward any problems of the year 2006 is his firm manifesto.

A few years ago Łukasz painted views of Wrocław, a city where he currently lives and works. The effect was amazing. He showed the buildings and streets as if they were about to be renovated, as if they have just been unearthed from a thick layer of ashes. This patina proved the greatest value in his eyes. Passing time and history, even the gloomy history of PRL (The People’s Republic of Poland), ennoble the common and verify the beauty.

Łukasz is focused on the past. But to say that he yields to passeistic atmosphere is not enough. The aim of his travels and the place of his initiation as an artist are cities rich in museums and monuments. The predellas painted in Siena are on one hand full of creativity while on the other hand they follow the rules and restrictions of Renaissance art as precisely as if their author went to Tuscany as a cataloguer of historic monuments who puts honesty of a researcher first.

Peeling paint, burial mounds in the landscape, ancient porticos and statues, lone rotundas standing at a precipice, they all form a catalogue of motifs of his “Italian” paintings. In the poems of Georg Trakl, in the paintings of Arnold Boecklin, an abandoned villa in a wild garden, where one can hear sounds of a sonata coming through the windows, symbolizes twilight, a feeling of approaching end. Łukasz carries us away from here and now, takes us on a time travel, to his fall of Renaissance – the perfect epoch, but already ended. The ideal will survive only in memory, museums and paintings.