Opening: Thursday, 16.05.2024, 7 p.m.
The exhibition will open untill 31.08.2024
Tuesday–Saturday, 12 noon–7 p.m.
Profile Foundation
Franciszkańska 6
Warsaw
Tomasz Ciecierski, Andrzej Dłużniewski
Jarosław Kozłowski, Teresa Tyszkiewicz
In his reviews from subsequent Paris Salons, Emil Zola paid attention not only to the paintings, but also to the walls they were supposed to cover. The author of works included in the Index of Forbidden Books, with his usual insight, was connecting Hausmann’s reconstruction of Paris with the growing demand for art, and to put it in a more contemporary language: he taught to notice the relationship between the growth in the real estate market and the growing demand in the art market. The large canvases of the academicians covered the plasterwork and tantalised their buyers with illusions, providing them with a cultural alibi.
The artists presented at the exhibition do not deceive the imagination with any illusions, they do not look back on the mimetic ambitions of art, nor do they reach for the outdated metaphors of a painting as a window to the world.
Jarosław Kozłowski has often discoursed on the “hypocrisy of images”, whose role comes down to to cover the wall, pretend to be something that they are not and, in fact, distract attention from what they are. The artist has repeatedly showed the art’s mastery in covering, camouflaging and masking. He was doing this in perhaps the most spectacular way in large-format watercolours, in which not only does he not reveal anything, but he also forces the viewer to see his own reflection in the shiny surfaces of the works framed in plexiglass. He draws viewers into a game of reflections, subversively playing with their expectations towards images.
In Teresa Tyszkiewicz’s works, covering large areas of walls, everything takes place on surfaces. Neither narrative nor mimetic, they stop the eye on the vibrating planes of large surfaces with a regular pattern “woven” from pins. The materials of her paintings, with the almost physically felt sharpness of metal pins, demand touch. The artist does not delude anyone with any illusions, she actually takes the viewer’s experience beyond visual perception. The presented works, with a thicket of rhythmically shimmering pins pierced into the canvas or soldered to sheet metal, tangibly bear traces of physical exertion.
Tomasz Ciecierski reminds with a penchant about the substantiality of painting, in a number of drawings and paintings he made a specific inventory of painting props: easels, hammers, brushes, jars or tubes of paint. At the exhibition, he shows paintings mounted on boards cut from the floor of his studio in Anin and on patchwork pieces of carpet from another of his studios. Against their background, as in multi-element “nailed together” compositions, he constructs arrangements of small, rectangular stretchers with colourful landscapes. Nevertheless, he directs our gaze down to what is underneath the painting, to the remains of paint, traces of work on subsequent canvases.
For Andrzej Dłużniewski, the visuality of a work was often just an addendum to words and texts. Reluctant to express, he believed that language should be “kept in check”. His paintings on gray, unprimed canvas were becoming planes on which he played out the relationships between the meaning of words, their grammatical gender and the colours assigned to particular types. An example of these visual-textual games are two paintings with demonstrative pronouns, great paintings as much to watch as to be read. And the very concept of the image the artist was turning inside out in his earlier works, in which the image itself was usually absent.
