PIOTR LAKOMY – I see no evil, I hear no evil, I speak no evil

I cannot see not because I am blind – I cannot see because I am not blind to so many things. Each successive image from the thousands that I am barraged with makes my perception of them less intense. I cease to differentiate between what I am looking at. The field of vision today is subject to the principle of balanced excess. The neutral background is gone; instead we can see everywhere a kaleidoscope of colourful patches, a pulsating monitor, a thematic façade or a landscape. The call to action stream keeps one in a state of permanent euphoria and inertia. Paradoxically, the ceaseless whirlpool of aesthetic stimulants is both strong enough to constantly arouse and homogenous enough to prevent one from ever waking up. We bask in the opaque blaze of an incessant stream of media messages. The oft-travelled roads of the visual regime do not offer any relief. A way out of a situation of excess lies in the middle of nowhere, amongst shattered concrete slabs, grey Styrofoam, bow-shaped rods that make up a gate to an eccentric ghetto of reduced shapes and hypnotic greys of Piotr Łakomy’s art.

I cannot hear not because I am deaf. Hearing successive histories from the thousands that I am barraged with by the culture industry makes me stop listening. One more narrative, justification, or anchoring an object in discourse will not change the spiritual stupor and aesthetic anaesthesia. Buildings, people, plants and all things shamelessly cry out their top importance. I am sick and tired of listening; I do not need someone else’s dreams, fantasies and fears. I seek exclusively simple forms of clean surfaces, capable of revealing the tangible and complex nature of the surrounding reality.

I cannot speak not because I am mute. You do not need yet another excuse, allegory or narrative. You are confronted with incontrovertible evidence rather than hazy confessions. These are austere objects, made up of waste that is too embarrassing to look at. Concrete, clothes driers, Styrofoam, car varnish. On the one hand, they do not belong to the established visual order, and yet they directly and indivisibly derive from it. Truncated values stand out from the surrounding reality and compose their own degraded universe. Some product of developmental processes, of economic excesses, a torrent of information that resists consumption, an inferno of objects and images that crush us every step we take triggers in us a longing for simplicity, for the power of immediate experience and for a lost capacity for judgement. Piotr Łakomy builds a minimalist ghetto of degraded tangibility, an environment in which we can once again observe and establish genuine relations with the outside world.

Kuba Bąk

translated by Marcin Turski

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