Personality Breakdown

An art critic has once described Jakub Gliński as “a tolerable portraitist of the Polish reality; only it is the reality represented by scrawled-over walls behind school sports grounds”. The images, signs and texts more or less carefully scrawled on the walls of apartment blocks, rubbish-bin sheds or fences – this is indeed the iconosphere from which Gliński derives his imaginarium. An aware recipient will decode there the slogans and symbols of anarchists, anti-fascists or the LGBT movement and will identify motifs and figures belonging to pop culture, often in deformed shapes. In his canvases, Gliński constructs an image of a world subjected to destruction; an internally conflicted, post-human world. The roots of his explorations lie in the oeuvre of the American street artist Jean-Michel Basquiat.
 
Gliński is attracted to the practice of layering verbal and visual messages by covering a text or image with another coating of paint. He is fascinated by the areas hidden underneath the surface of the sprayed-on paint. Those texts emerge from underneath a solid layer of paint as far less intensive, illegible, prompting him to answer, negate or enter a creative dialogue with them. Gliński paints impulsively and intuitively; he applies paint in layers with an expressive gesture or sprays it on with an airbrush, a spray gun that produces smears with shaky, blurred edges. He does not rationalize his creative output; having taken free expression as the basis of his work, he moves against the currents of the academe. This does not mean, however, that his creative process is reduced to a brief conceptual gesture; it often takes him many hours of work in his sketchbook to arrive at a solution.
 
Gliński’s output carries a considerable introspective load. Personality Breakdown is one of his works referring to the issue of memory dysfunctions. He directly refers to the functioning of his brain, to the eviction of some images and contents from his memory, “as if my brain had experienced something and failed to retain it or deleted it after a while”. He perceives this mechanism as analogous to graffiti removal. He compares the practice of painting and overpainting images to forgetting and repressing events or emotions. All that remains when these processes are completed are bits and pieces that create a fragmented inner world; an universe locked in images constructed from scraps of reality.