We are pleased to announce the exhibition In Regress by Wawrzyniec Tokarski, which will open at the gallery on 21 June. Tokarski is showing new works on muslin, fabric, and PVC, where he assembles individual pieces into a picture, or what he calls a virtual picture. The works selected for the exhibition engage with a several themes: at issue is the questioning of an illusory world created through advertising, of scientific models, and of order as a life concept. All works in the show are engaged in a subtle social critique.
Composite shows a photograph from the Washington Post. We see the North Korean ruler Kim Jongun at his desk. On the desk, we see an Apple computer, which the artist reveals as product placement, which is underlined and ironically commented on by the font he uses in the work. Torkarski is a contemporary painter whose work reflects politics and society. He works with quotations from various pictorial worlds, text fragments, and other set pieces that he weaves together from a critical perspective. In this way, he succeeds in creating a representation of our times using the means of painting. He takes his motifs partly from the communications system that surrounds us all the time, partly from the Internet, and partly simply from his everyday surroundings. In their combination, the borrowed pictorial elements undergo a revaluation. At the same time, the slogans and types used add to the purely visual information. In some works, this goes so far that the words and letters themselves become the sole picture.
In The Subject, Tokarski engages with the so-called string theory, a theory that is supposed to unite the theory of relativity with quantum mechanics – a radically new approach to the structure of space and matter. The artist shows the beholder that our own notions are always limited, and that scientific models are but a representation and a reflection of their own time. Tokarski is also keenly interested in questioning the context of a picture: how does it work in a particular place, in a specific space? How much form does the beholder need to be able to understand certain information? What happens with blank spaces in a picture? In The Subject, a work that is a combination of figurative, abstract and textual elements that are displaced, which shifts their meaning. The text, which was once a coherent sentence and therefore perhaps also made sense, is interrupted and only put back together in the beholder’s act of reading and translating.
“In don’t really know whether I would call the end result explicitly a ‘picture’, as a whole, it is more a ‘virtual’ picture, the ‘possibility’ of a picture, a little like the virtual particles are the ‘possibility’ of matter. This possibility appears, disappears again, and possibly reappears elsewhere, probably in a different form.” (Warzyniec Tokarski)
