Warsaw

Warsaw by Krzysztof Kokoryn is a subjective, painterly guide to the capital. It is filled with memories from the 1990s, when he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, as well as with today’s frames: architecture, street interiors, squares and parks, cinemas, theatres and clubs.

Many of these places no longer exist, they disappear, they change before our eyes. Kokoryn fills them with urban life, doing so with Hrabal‑like kindness and tenderness, because his Warsaw knows how to have fun — and if it hurries, it does so with a smile, in dance, in joyful leaps, with wind in its hair, accompanied by music. Tomasz Stańko plays the trumpet under the Palm Tree at de Gaulle Roundabout, and there is always a passer-by or a street musician with a drum or another instrument. Animals dance in this cheerful procession as well. These paintings carry a mood of lightness, acceptance, carefree ease, a touch of surrealism, laughter and distance from existential problems. Painting is a land of freedom.

In the catalogue accompanying the exhibition, the Warsaw views painted by Krzysztof Kokoryn are paired with short literary forms by Tomasz Wiśniewski, written in first-person narration. But do not treat them as simple commentaries or descriptions of the paintings, because, as the author claims: “Words do not exhaust all possibilities. One can, for example, look and, thanks to the image, grasp the essence of things.”

It is therefore worth reading these texts independently of the images, tracing intertextual references, enjoying their fictionality, absurdity, the playfulness tinged with reflection on the condition of contemporary humans, the humour masking loneliness and fears, and discovering hope.

But are these two worlds — Kokoryn’s painterly one and Wiśniewski’s literary one — not, in fact, interwoven like a Warsaw palimpsest?