WINTER IN SNEAKERS – Tomasz Kopcewicz

With their muted colours and simplified forms, Tomasz Kopcewicz’s new paintings look almost ascetic. Unlike, however, in the accompanying video showing a monotonous image of a sea landscape, recorded in one fixed-camera take, the paintings do not share any single viewpoint. Their tangled spatialities, chaotic labyrinths of form, their crumbling geometries and broken perspectives, all undermine the logic of visual space that offers the viewer a sense of certainty as to its own situation. The nonobviousnesses of these paintings and their spatial illusions elude the rationalising capacity of vision.

Although Kopcewicz’s paintings deal primarily with the human environment, the human figure itself is missing from them altogether. This environment is seen in a highly abstract manner but, at the same time, in a close relationship with the otherwise absent human figures. In On the Way (2007-2011), Kopcewicz portrays street barriers: objects that determine our movement in space, simple and usually inconspicuous devices for the regulation of human traffic and spatial behaviour. In austere representations of architectural details of empty church interiors (Black Paw, 2010), phantasmal fears are translated into the formal discipline and sketch-like simplification of ambiguous forms.

The artist’s recent paintings seem distantly informed by photographs of heaps of rubble, smouldering ruins covered by ash; images of reality in which something goes bad all the time, malfunctioning and ailing, like peeling-off paint. In the artist’s second-to-last series, Trouble Is Our Business (2011), the discipline of geometry and its underlying ideas went awry in tangled constructions of disintegrating forms. The current paintings, though formally more pared-down, continue to convey a sense of a reality that is malfunctioning, poorly organised, and as inconsistent with expectations as wearing sneakers in winter.

Tomasz Kopcewicz (born 1974) graduated in painting and intermedia from the Gdańsk Academy of Fine Arts in 2002. Author of paintings and videos. He lives and works in Warsaw. His solo shows have been presented by venues such as Łaźnia CCA in Gdańsk, 2004; Klima Bocheńska Gallery in Warsaw, 2007; Profile Foundation in Warsaw, 2011; Galerie Sandhofer in Innsbruck and Galeria Miejska in Gdańsk, both 2012.