Pracownia Wschodnia invites you to an exhibition of paintings by Amadeusz Pucek - "Pejzaż prywatny" (Private Landscape).
Opening 16 March 2023 at 18:00
Our reality operates in the future anterior tense (future anterior tense). We live in the conviction that we have lost agency and our future is predetermined. This causes us to no longer care about attention and will, allowing ourselves to merely drift in the world envisaged for us.
In the series presented at the exhibition, the artist, as he puts it, takes a kind of step backwards – backwards in the face of the culture of immediacy and superficiality. He observes his surroundings with attentiveness. He seeks the essence of things in experiencing seemingly prosaic situations, just as process philosophers and pragmatists did. Like them, in the process of calm observation of his surroundings, he delves into the complexity of its physical aspects, whilst simultaneously leaving space for metaphysical experience. He records his observations using the painterly language of fairly classical figurative painting, in equally classical oil technique. The motifs that appear in his paintings are a "landscape" we know well.
The artist divides the experience into observation and recording, devoting as much focus and time as possible to both processes. In opting for this, he does not paint directly from nature, but on the basis of sketches and notes tries to reach the essence of the representation, to discover features that would be much more than its representation. The record, that is the process of painting itself, is an attempt at a deeper and fuller understanding of even the most ordinary object. Painting in this way, he also reclaims the concept of beauty, flattened by today's culture. It can, after all, function detached from it, as a subjective, "private" experience of each of us, simultaneously going beyond aesthetic categories or even beyond what is visible, and connecting rather with concepts of closeness, uniqueness and goodness. The title "Pejzaż prywatny" is a kind of oxymoron. The open macro scale meets the scale of the individual here.
The artist also includes the independent creation of the stretcher from scratch into the whole creative process – in a traditional way, using nails instead of staples and a staple gun, and bone glue for priming the canvas. Somewhere in Warsaw's Grochów district lies his painterly hermitage, where he devotes himself to meditations on the landscape of modernity.
Contact: amadeusz.pucek@gmail.com