Wentrup is pleased to present new works by the Polish artist Wawrzyniec Tokarski in what is already his fourth solo show at the gallery.
Tokarski’s painting uses the visual vocabulary available from advertising and digital image processing, and it also takes up strategies that developed and are used mainly on the Internet. For example, copyleft, the license developed in opposition to copyright, whose logo is a vertically mirrored “c.” It stands for the freedom to freely process and further develop original works in order to prevent their restricted appropriation. The choice of shapes, motifs, logos from the excessive visual supply doesn’t follow any fixed quality criteria; the artist functions as a filter of all information. Instead of following a concept or a fixed structure, what belongs together will come together in the chaos. Thus it isn’t surprising that realistically painted street views are next to a nostalgic children’s book aesthetic, collages next to rebuses, and hard edge.
The title of the exhibition, "The Advantage of the Unfortunate," in addition to its character as a slogan, can also be read as one of the directives of Tokarski’s work. Whether a hole reveals the stretch frame at precisely this point, or whether a black circle completes the realistically painted scene, is decided for every painting anew. While the set pieces from the mass media are often meticulously painted, their originally often superficial perfection is usually intentionally impaired and questioned in the process of painting. The empty supports are frequently characterised by their imperfection: pieces of cloth sewn together, found plywood, dented aluminium. Other canvases are seemingly accidentally completed by disruptions in the form of omissions or monochrome colour fields, which leads to positive and/or negative areas on the works.
Tokarski’s paintings do not aim at surprising effects. Rather, every painting creates its own nuance of uncertainty. The pictures often address the spectator with profound immediacy. They operate by association, whereby the picture and text levels are reformulated to create new meanings and thereby generate a specific moment of insight. Tokarski’s fictions on the ubiquitous image world of media society do not offer specific statements or information, but address the uncertainty of world conceptualisation.
