STATEMENT OF WORK

„(...) Our road is littered with aesthetic markers – tiny events signifying transitions, or blocks, or little narrative charges – that make straying a delicious proposition. These can be seen as detours from the straight and proper path laid down, but the formal depths within each little cul-de-sac represent a world in itself. To gaze into the depths, to catalogue and memorialise each little aesthetic outlier like a well-attuned magpie, is a noble pursuit. After all, if we don’t do it for ourselves, who will?

From modest beginnings in 2010, Robert Pawliczek’s cataloguing mania reached colossal proportions, with miniature collages amassed like the detritus of a mas- sive rubbish-covered snowball. Biscuit wrappers, post-it notes, noodle cooking instructions – there’s very little that escapes these urban reveries. If one had to pick out a tenuous common thread, it would be in the unintended beauty and shock of industrial design.

These collages make a nonsense of the concept of a unified, monolithic work of art. While collage has often been an impulse towards accretion – building up an overall impression through addition – we should think of Pawliczek’s collages instead as an attempt to tease out, through isolation and juxtaposition, the aesthetic qua- lities that made these moments markers along his own road. In the shapes and positioning of the ‘Originals’, you can see his desire to recapture an episode, an intrusion, a shred of insight.

This is peripatetic art, souvenirs of a fleeting aesthetic experience, like a momentary ischemic attack. It’s a direct result of Pawliczek’s ventures into the world, aesthetic encounters given form (...)“

- EW

„(...) Now I am pondering on the many possibilities of stretching a canvas and the structure it holds. Canvas stretching is a ritual, it is a tradition that connects painters to one another. It reveals so much more than just holding the plane onto which the two-dimensional painted world is depicted.

“What is a painting to you? Canvas stretched on wood?” “Yeah.”

What inspires him is the return to the traditional canvas and wood. The canvas and wood grounds the story in art history. There is something soothing in tying your thoughts to a known factor. Painting is a traditional language through which you can always explore new ideas. He needs that for some time. To me, he is studying again and again how a painting can be hidden or seen, exist but not as a window for the viewer to look through.

In a way, we all have a love-hate relationship with painting. This traditional type of artistic expression is constantly being abandoned and redeemed.

“What is your relationship with painting, your relationship with canvas?”

“Just when you think you can’t think any more about painting...”

- LL