Przemyslaw Matecki
29.10. – 20.12.2008
Vernissage: 28.10. 6 p.m. – 9 p.m.

On Tuesday 28.10.2008 carlier | gebauer will be launching Polish painter Przemyslaw Matecki’s first solo show. His paintings, composed of magazines, found photographs, documents and oil paint will be exhibited here for the first time in Berlin. Whilst in the past Matecki worked primarily in the format of the magazines whose pages he painted over, he now also produces collaged paintings on canvas. In these pieces he arranges found photographs and materials around which he shapes his painting.

In his smaller works he takes pages from glossy magazines as his base, opening up views of icons of popular culture set between thick abstract layers painted over the underlying images. In contrast, this relationship is turned on its head in his larger canvases. In these works he affixes found photographs, notes and documents of unidentified individuals to the canvases and begins to intensify his painting more and more around these elements, until it finds its own particular direction, with the resulting colour gradients endowing a new cohesion on the photos and the materials. The connection established changes fundamentally in each piece, reflecting the way in which the source material varies.  Matecki reproduces the moment of confrontation in which painting encounters the found image. Global pop icons, ranging from Superman to Robert Smith, isolated from the context of their fans’ devotion, demand a different colour palette than the so much more regionally determined aesthetic of porn magazines or the alienating intimacy of found black-and-white photo albums. The way in which Matecki works with these varying formats is not guided by the notion of sorting and classifying, but instead by the direct painterly emotion of the photographic image. Matecki’s painting is real.

With the paint applied in a myriad of layers, Matecki’s painting never seems formal, and never comes to rest. It produces its reality from photographic clues. It is not so much searching for a definitive form but instead might be said to be seeking a direction where the painting will converge with the documents applied to its surface. It creates a record of the process of the work done on the images, an urgency and presence that spring into being as a result of the conjunction of found documents and painting. When conjuring up these images, Matecki does not hunt out the photos he works on: he stumbles upon them, in Warsaw’s streets, in flats, by chance. This method allows him to create a visual universe in which all the elements appear to enjoy equal status. People are incorporated into his abstract paintings, sometimes as emblems of mass culture, such as in his earlier works, sometimes in photos from family albums, as is the case in this exhibition. With this sense of an assemblage of clues, into which pop icons and anonymous individuals are slotted, Matecki’s works set up a penetrating, almost violent, tension-imbued relationship between found documents and their painterly integration into the canvas.

Parallel to the Frieze Art Fair his works were shown in the Hollybush Garden Gallery and were also exhibited recently in London’s Zabludowicz Collection.
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