BENIGN STUPOR
Wil Aballe Art Projects
September 12 - October 17, 2020
WAAP is pleased to present an exhibition of new photographic works by Patryk Stasieczek. This is the artist’s second exhibition with the gallery, following his 2016 exhibition, Burn Out. In his previous exhibition, Stasieczek explored lensless photographic techniques through lush, variegated photograms that considered the painterly resonance with the medium. While these new photographs are not lensless images, the parallels to painting are immediate.
Stasieczek’s new photographic works are a continued investment into the material techniques of image making through colour. Polypropylene plays center stage in this series of studio photographic works, a material used by the artist to control and amplify light in his past photographic installations and work spaces, and broadly used in construction as an impermanent material. In this work, polypropylene becomes malleable in a visceral manner: heated, stretched, and stressed to the point of breaking, its surface results in a mix of geometric forms and swathes of colour – punctuated by intrusions of solid chromatic fields. The surface captured is frenetic and maximalist in its photographic experimentation.
From my position looking at his new series of images, what comes to mind is rupture both in the figurative and representational sense of the word. Stasieczek’s photographs encapsulate upheaval, disruption and allude to methods of assessing, feeling, relating, adapting, and healing. The geometric punctures bring to mind Lucio Fontana’s desire to free his canvases of its trappings. Here though, the desire is transgressive and elsewhere. These photographs allude to actions as images, and speak to a broader emotional landscape tied to praxis. The works are a release that lean into another space, of play, of the invisibility of emotional labour and freedom. These images are deeply personal abstractions, physical meditations that stem from internal conflicts that mingle with glimpses of hope, redemption, endurance, resilience and persistence. These works are a mechanism for understanding. Benign Stupor is an acknowledgement of the inadequacy of representation, presenting truth as a fallible and fugitive construct.
Exhibition text by Wil Aballe