Stories (1)

The painting Stories (1) by Zbigniew Rogalski is another chapter of the artist’s painterly deliberations about the mechanisms of perception, the properties of colours and the possibilities of building illusions. These issues, as well as the question of realism and the problem of painting as such, are fairly ever-present in the entire art of Rogalski. He is a painter in the strict sense of the word, and he approaches his own skills and what he actually sees when looking at reality with suspicion. He does not filter nor purify the images he notices, but pastes them onto the canvas with all the disturbances: the overlapping planes, the shadows, or light reflexes. His works reveal what the eye records and the mind – trying to avoid an excess of stimuli – avoids.

Stories (1) is one of the artist’s experiments with colour. It can also be seen as a specific reprocessing of the concept of the supremacy of white – the primacy of a pure feeling and action – which Kazimir Malevich achieved in his White Square on a White Background (1918), and which led him to announce the end of imagery. Rogalski, however, uses colour for somewhat different purposes. The very iconographic description of his work is already problematic – it is difficult to decide without a doubt whether the glass aquaria presented by the artist are empty or filled with water, or whether they are painted up to a certain level. The effect of ambiguity is further strengthened by composition and complicated perspective, while the precise representation of shadow, light, and the edges seen through the glass, are proof of the artist’s observational skills and his analysis of technical abilities.

In his paintings, Rogalski makes hues absolute in its visual sense, and the mode of his work with colour is a consequence of the existential dimension that he gives his painting. He does not apply symbolic meanings to colour but uses it to express his inner dilemmas that stem from his careful observations. Rogalski registers the visual complexity of reality and the nuances of events taking place on different planes and constituting a multi-layered image which undermines our schematic seeing and interpreting of the world. In particular, he attacks the commonly understood realism which offers a stable but superficial vision of the world.

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