I have spent the last 12 years painting these paintings, striving for the impossibility of reproduction, any transfer of contact with the original through the copy. I have sataralled to make the painting as haptic, requiring direct contact, as much as was within my capabilities.
"The skin is the oldest and most sensitive of our organs, our.first means of communication and our most effective shield. [...]Even the transparent cornea of the eye is covered with a layer of modified skin." wrote Juhani Pallsamaa.What if we were skinless, uncovered, exposed to blows, and attacks from the air, other organisms, the skin, however, perfectly protects us from others. It separates, making our existence safe. In inimical situations by touch we get to know each other, bring one closer to the other, without the protection of the skin everything would be subject to exchange, mixing, constant replenishment. That's why I think of the invisible layer of skin, I depict entities without skin, imagined, stretched on canvases, not integrated, alive.
I only paint the questions that bother me, the constant search for answers, I do not answer. I try to follow the form and use it to talk through the multi-layered, haptic structures of these paintings. I immerse myself in layer after layer.over the years, forgetting the layers created before. How the skin does not remember, or We forget that the skin is constantly reborn, creating anew. In the form, I strived for non-reproducibility, non-transferability through the screen, photographs, all forms of duplicate copies. So that only full visual, haptic contact with the image, so to speak, face to face, only this contact gives the possibility of full reception
I was born in 1971 in Lodz, Poland.
In the years 1992-1997 I studied at the Strzeminski Academy of Fine Arts in Lodz and graduated from Professor Andrzej Kabala's studio of gravure printing.
After graduation, I started as a photographer and a mixed media artist.
In the years 1996-2002 I took part in numerous exhibitions, including:
"Marcowe gody 3 / March Mating 3“, International Artists Museum, Lodz (1996);
“Slawomir Kubala?!” Gallery FF, Lodz (1996),( http://galeriaff.eu/0kubal_a.htm );
“Pola indywidualności” I Biennale Polskiej fotografii, galeria Arsenał, Poznań (1998)
“Separation” Mała Gallery ZPAF-CSW, Warsaw, Poland (1999), ( http://fototapeta.art.pl/fti-skmge.html );
"goEurope, the kaleidoscopic eye”, Braunschweig's Museum for Photography,
Germany (2001);
“Around The Decade. Polish Photography of the 1990’s”, Museum of Art in Lodz,
FF Gallery, National Museum in Wroclaw (2002).
Scholarships and awards:
Fisr Prize in the 22nd Photographic Confrontations competition in Gorzow Wielkopolski (1997);
Scholarship from the Tadeusz Kulisiewicz Grants and Awards Foundation in Warsaw (1997);
Semi-Annual Creative Scholarship from the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage (1999);
State Scholarship in Kunsthogskolen in Bergen, Norway (2000-2001).
From 2001 onwards I have grown less and less satisfied with the results of my work. I avoided exhibiting my works and in my creative activity I kept moving away from photography, at first by turning to pinhole photography, then to short video forms. The wide spread of digital techniques (to which I also succumbed) made me increasingly troubled by the fact that artworks were lacking a physical vestige.
From 2002 to 2009 I made a living mainly as an advertising photographer. Eventually, in 2010, I gave up photography (as well as previous ideas to express myself through this medium) and I started working as a film colorist. In private, I was drawing obsessively.
In July 2010 my first son was born.
In 2013 I came to the conclusion that my only salvation in Art is Painting. I needed the physical matter, and I needed a form in which I could contain time. I also needed that form to be imperishable, because in the past I consciously did not let my photographs stay in fixing baths until the prescribed end – I left the process open so that the recorded images would disappear over time.
In 2013 I began working on a painting series the initial intention of which was to present my relationship with my son: a kind of an inward-directed interpretation of fatherhood. Over time, however, the images came to be about the relationship with the body, the viscera, the fragility of our bodies.
"I think in the paintings you have managed to tell the story of touching with your eyes, or create touchable images. A very sensual weave, a very close connection. These are very synesthetic images." (L.)
