Academy of Fine Arts Painting Gallery, 2004<\/p>\n
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The exhibition of works by S\u0142awomir Karpowicz opens the second season of the Krak\u00f3w Academy of Fine Arts Painting Gallery. In a way this gallery was created by S\u0142awek, who claimed that closeness to works of art is one of the primary elements of teaching. Displaying paintings is a means to meet the artist who as recently as two years ago was among us, who painted and taught, and who is now sorely missed. This exhibition is an appropriate moment to \u2018ask the author\u2019 about the source of the great power of his painting.<\/p>\n
Is this about the motifs? The still lives, landscapes, self-portraits? Rather not. Karpowicz draws with force; he delineates objects, stairs and spaces, the structures of his paintings. From deep and dark tones he pulls out, with screaming colours, unexpected fragments, surprising arrangements of images as if turning everything inside out multiple times. As a result, what is hardly recognisable ceases to be real and the plane of the background \u2013 a wall or curtain, the border of wood panelling and wallpaper \u2013 turns into a landscape, stretched horizontally with pulsing light or shaky like the late \u2018Japanese Gardens\u2019 by Monet. In \u2018The Geometry Lesson\u2019 and \u2018The Anatomy Lesson\u2019 there is crowded space on a plane with rhythmically arranged figures.<\/p>\n
When one looks closely at a single element, multiplicity is replaced by substance and gesture. Karpowicz\u2019s painting contains both the Frenchness of Braque\u2019s and the dark, ravenous, poetic temperament of Spanish art. Deriving inspiration from this tradition gave S\u0142awek the power and joy of painting as well as faith in the point of painting, a faith which he himself promoted, while now his paintings do so.<\/p>\n
Adam Brincken<\/p>\n
Painter, draughtsman, Professor the Krak\u00f3w Academy of Fine Arts<\/i><\/p>\n