Bad Drawings

One of the origins of Radek Szlaga’s Bad Drawings is his perverse fascination with failure. The grammar of his painting vocabulary is made up of errors and shortcomings. It is easier to come up with ugly drawings if one is right-handed and holds the marker or the pencil in the left hand – and that is exactly what the artist does. The loose associations related to and about prejudices, and the ironic treatment of the motif of punishment – to which we are led by flames and the inscription “hell” splashed on the paper in a violent gesture – prove that the artist’s imagination is governed by anarchy. Szlaga ignores the principles of composition or correct spelling. The image of reality as revealed in his works is constructed of incohesive fragments.

In the seemingly chaotic drawings devoid of logic, one can also notice elements of social criticism, pop culture motifs, as well as graphic themes and objects presented in a pastiche manner, if only to mention the skull with the crossed bones, or the packaging of a popular cigarette brand. Szlaga is a skillful commentator on reality, lively reacting to the surrounding iconosphere, cultural changes, and the stereotypes that shape social life. The spontaneity, rejection of canons, and dominating currents in formal explorations place his works close to neo-expressionism, a trend of the 1970’s and 1980’s which opposed the esthetics of minimalism and the assumptions of conceptualism. In one of his works, the artist even referred to the American graffiti artist associated with that movement, Jean-Michel Basquiat.

As in the case of other selected neo-expressionists, the seemingly careless doodles by Szlaga conceal careful gestures: a line, a spot, or a glued on piece of a newspaper is the result of a well thought out decision. Bad Drawings thus acquire traits of new mannerism. They are an attempt at creating a formula of the language which would be the most appropriate tool for describing the world, able to reveal the anxieties of the times, and applying recognizable categories and signs. Contrary to what it may seem, the artist does observe certain principles of decorum: only bad drawings can speak about an unhealthy reality, and only fragments can illustrate the state of being lost in the post-modern chaos of words and images.

Izabela Kopania