untitled

Wojciech Łazarczyk has been consistently exploring the nature of painting for years. On the one hand, he looks at it from the perspective of the material: various kinds of canvas, paints, brushes and the effects produced by working with painting tools. On the other hand, he is not particularly interested in matter, he does not explore its specificities, and it is not in its properties that he seeks a solution to his painting dilemmas. This trivial, technical aspect of the painter’s work, to which he himself pays little attention, is nonetheless directly related to the iconic layer of his paintings. This is because their basic substance is colour, the colour conveyed by the pigments and binders of the paint. In his painterly explorations, Łazarczyk has reached the limit of what can be represented. However, the iconographic emptiness of his paintings is an illusion. Although he does not use figurative elements and realism is to him an alien mode of depiction, representation has not disappeared from the horizon of his considerations; he extracts it from the colour, light and texture of the painting.

Łazarczyk does not tell the viewer what he has painted or what the viewer should seek in his painting. He leaves his works untitled; both those that seem completely non-representational and those produced slightly earlier, which evince signs of geometrising and magical abstraction. A 1993 painting from Collection II belongs to the latter group. There is a lot happening on the surface of the canvas covered in a non-uniform beetroot colour. In its upper part, there are strongly drawn lines that seem nearly convex, as if scored from below. They form a frame in the painting, an arcade closing a window or an indefinite opening. This opening seems to give onto an unidentified deep with a dense mass bubbling inside it. The paint-coated canvas seems to be boiling, to live a life of its own. The task of understanding this life the artist leaves to the viewer.

Contact with Łazarczyk’s painting provides more than just a visual experience. The very sight of the canvas, and the paint on it, leaves the viewer with a feeling of a nearly palpable density and velvetiness. The physicality of the applied substrates, the material intensity of the painting are impossible to overlook. What emerges from beneath the successive layers of colour is a derivative of the dialogue between the material and the artist’s vision, a perfect recognition of the technical and iconic sphere of imagery.

Izabela Kopania
translated from Polish by Klaudyna Michałowicz