„…recent paintings – Episode I” | Piotr Kielan

„…recent paintings – Episode I” | Piotr Kielan

Solo drawing exhibition
Curator: Sławomir Kuszczak
Opening: 27.03.2024, 18:00
Szewska 16 Gallery, 16 Szewska Str.
27.03-14.04.2024

Currently, there is a problem with painting, painting creates images, and billions of images are disseminated by the media. It’s just that these media images have little in common with the images brought to life by painters. There is still an elite of people who create unique objects – paintings and an elite of people who are fortunate to experience these objects in the only way that is right for them, in the original.

What percentage of our population realizes this? Who knows what painting is? Who can answer the question: which painting is good and which is bad?

Piotr Kielan’s painting is seemingly very easy to analyze, classify and place within the framework of visual culture. We can undoubtedly look for the roots of this work in Polish colorism or in a broader phenomenon, post-impressionism. We will also not make a mistake by finding in this painting visual traces left by the expressionists, led by their precursor Edward Munch.

If we want to confirm such views, it is enough to trace the history of painting and its creators in post-war Wroclaw, the creative homeland of Piotr Kielan. In those times, in Eugeniusz Geppert’s Wroclaw, as well as in Piotr Potworowski’s Poznan, post-impressionism was ruling, painting was ruling, which radiates into later times and whose traces can be found in contemporary work, including in the work of Piotr Kielan.

If we add to this that carefully examining nature Piotr Kielan creates “solid paintings” on canvases using paints, i.e. we say that he is a “traditional painter”, we get a space, a material that we can develop, deepen, specify and justify using the art historian’s skills…

However, such considerations were not the reason for inviting Piotr Kielan to organize a solo exhibition in Poznan. The reason for my decision was different and is connected with a series of specific events that I must describe briefly…

(part one…, full text at the opening)

Sławomir Kuszczak