JAROSŁAW KOZŁOWSKI
RECYKLED NEWS

Works from the Recycled News series comprise an installation consisting of several dozen newspaper pages painted over with watercolours. Hailing from different parts of the world, whatever their language, place of publication or political orientation, all have been framed in the same manner, all follow the same aesthetic of rhythms and repetitions and, most importantly, all are equally indecipherable. Covering entire newspaper pages with watercolour paints, the artist not only calls their credibility into question, but also evidences the aestheticisation of mass media. Newspapers pretending to be paintings activate what he calls the ‘hypocrisy of images’, their role, like that of the media, being to obscure reality and turn our attention away from it.

Kozłowski, who doesn’t want to be a political artist, treats as purely rhetorical the question of the possibility of aesthetics beyond politics. Philosophy-engaging conceptualism was for him a school of artistic radicalisation, and his analytical investigations acquired an increasingly critical dimension. Yet his critique, dealing with the ideological and political foundations of society, is formulated in philosophical rather than political terms. His favourite strategy is to revoke and relativise meanings. For Kozłowski, both politics and aesthetics are a spectacle in which he refuses to participate. Politics in his works becomes a media babble, and aesthetics is something he treats as a school of seduction.