Adam Patrzyk: Essays
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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.
