A Portrait of the Arsenal Gallery

Tymek Borowski approached the act of portraying the Arsenal Gallery as if he were to produce a profile of the institution. He interviewed the staff, analysed the website, work records and reviews of the gallery’s doings. He took on the role of an auditor intending to help the institution improve its methods and ways of fulfilling its tasks. We would be inclined to regard such research as a prelude to work that falls into the other area of Borowski’s inquiry: info-graphics illustrating patterns along which art acts in society. Yet the data he collected was used to create “a visually attractive concentration of strangeness that serves no purpose and means nothing”. For this, in his own words, is the nature of A Portrait of the Arsenal Gallery, a piece of digital graphics with undeniably painterly qualities.

Borowski belongs to a group of artists who, at the threshold of the second decade of this century, moved away from new media towards painting, considered anachronistic means of expression. Critics were inclined to see in this gesture a “fatigue with reality” and the so-called “critical art”, by then somewhat outmoded, and they deemed Borowski’s painting manner as deriving from Surrealism. The artist himself pointed to the need to move away not so much from reality as from works saturated with meanings, the reception of which resembles solving a puzzle. Borowski’s statements suggest that he did not treat painting as a means of communicating content: “For me, painting is not a good medium for telling stories. I don’t think about what I want to say through a painting”.

A Portrait of the Arsenal Gallery was created with Borowski’s creative process governed by unfettered associations: “It is all about feeling, activating imagination and intuition to transform information into impressionistic, metaphorical images”. The composition of amorphous creations close to the imaginarium of the underwater world is governed by the principle of horror vacui. The whole is ruled by a kind of picture-inside-a-picture arrangement: a framed canvas (or perhaps a display case, or a box?) with a heart-like object shown in the centre. The oneiric portrait of the gallery is an image of an indefinable place, which each viewer should interpret according to their own key. It is hard to escape the feeling that the fleshy non-forms are a metaphor for what pulses beneath the crust of a factual report; for dry data are not enough to capture the essence and spirit of an institution.

>>> Read interview with the artist <<<