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Tomasz Ciecierski’s explorations focus on two, closely interlinked threads. One is landscape, which is the leading theme in the artist’s work; the other is painting, with all the aspects it entails: technique, skill, painting process, perception and relation to reality.

When creating his characteristic untitled landscape compositions, Ciecierski starts off with a “real” landscape. However, the method of his activity differs from the working mode of the 19^th c. representatives of the genre, who would begin the process of “preserving” the views painting en plein air. When painting, Ciecierski does not leave his studio and works by referring to snippets of nature recorded in his memory, using the language of colours and impressions. His systematic deliberations on the notion of painting lead him to its significant reduction. In his synthetic landscapes, which function predominantly due to the use of colour, there is one constant element always present: the line of the horizon, suggested by the juxtaposed hues and strokes of the brush.

The construction of the works, characteristic to the artist, is another issue which is related to the notion of imaging, or rather representing the reality/landscape. Ciecierski has abandoned the traditional understanding of the painting as a two-dimensional canvas. His works, composed of a number of smaller canvases placed next to each other or even overlapping each other, are complicated multi-layer structures which undermine stereotypical thinking about a painting. The artist’s concept not only questions what the viewers are accustomed to, but forces one to revisit the conventional understanding of realism, defined as a faithful, objective, and mimetic reproduction of reality. Such rejection of realism thus understood was already present in the painting of the Impressionists and Paul Cézanne.

Ciecierski builds the image structures from numerous elements of the processed landscape. He combines canvases showing different takes on the same motif, for example, from different vantage points, and then compiles the different snapshots of the remembered view. From small elements he synthesizes the landscape, aiming at reflecting reality in all its complexity and obtaining the fullest and most multi-faceted image possible.

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