ZBIGNIEW ROGALSKI- First snow

The exhibition will be on view until January 3, 2010

“We do not in fact encounter whiteness as such”, explains Zbyszek Rogalski. “Even a sheet of paper is not white”. But one can try to paint it. Is it in order to see it clearly, “black on white”, as the Polish idiom goes? In his characteristically subversive manner the painter reverses the rhetorical, idiomatic order. This strikes you at a glance, “white on black”. Besides, so much has been painted already that painting over seems today no less promising, efficient and ecological.

Painting white is a unique task, all the more so for a person who treats painting as a living and a way of life, a manner of coming to terms with it. If, then, we can see painting as a special cognitive tool, we can also say with some degree of affectation that painting in general, and painting white in particular, is the fingering of objects with one’s eyes.

The whiteness that Rogalski has in mind most probably does not exist in nature at all. It is rather a unique construct of the human mind, a state of ultimate sublimation, disregard of and freedom from functionality. The gesture of painting white what is black is both simple and radical, and has a significant rhetorical potency. It is simultaneously a painterly and a political gesture, one that reverses the order of things with one sweep. Moreover, whiteness contains the critical property of screening and at the same time revealing much of what was previously completely invisible.

Zbyszek Rogalski approaches it all rationally, as if he regarded himself from the perspective of a scholar. He records his successive discoveries and studies by means of photography. Most likely in this apparently objective way he wishes to add to the overall illusion; he fully realises that the design of one’s own imaginary view of things is a life mission of those who take up painting white professionally.

Łukasz Gorczyca

translated by Marcin Turski