Painting interests me as a medium per se; as a specific kind of activity on the field of art.
I feel that paintings never cease transgressing; they never are what they are and that only - paintings are always contextualized; every element in a painting has its own weight - even the tiniest of gestures automatically links back to art history. There is no ‘zero', or neutral situation - every single manner of painting conveys meaning and it is virtually impossible not to be constantly aware of that while painting. It has all been done before and there is very little room left, but that I find particularly interesting a pretext to work in this field.

Painting as an artistic genre remains in ostensible separateness in relation to other media as a result of a division into painting and non-painting. Jacque Rancière in his essay "..." outlined this discourse setting it within the new and very interesting perspective observable in the phrasing he chooses when sets out to redefine complex phenomenon referred to as ‘contemporary art' - he says: "That which replaced the art of painting(...) that, which occupies spaces deserted by portraits.[...]". Another quotation from the same text, which corresponds well with my way of thinking: "Painting is not just one among many arts. Its name denotes a certain arrangement (dipositif) of exposition - of a certain form of art's visibility"

A specific form of art's visibility, deeply rooted in social consciousness. It is both reflexive and referential - just think: among the group of viewers with little-to-none artistic literacy, nearly every one of them starts seeking recognizable bits of reality whenever confronted with an abstract painting.

Painting as art carries with it a hidden promise of meaning and every single instantiation of a painting is immanently contemplative.

The new series of my works, before anything else, treat about the process of painting and bring to the fore the entire by-product of my previous works; I have portrayed the half-painted, abandoned pieces, frayed or otherwise damaged canvass, oil-stains, oil-trodden floors. It all bears witness of my earlier activities. I think the need to portray the process of painting itself - which is, after all, my immediate reality - is fair enough a reason to start painting. I enjoy the closed- circuit quality to it, the frailty of it, that the forms are literally picked up from the ground - it is recycling of sorts.

I meant my new paintings to be contemplative - I deeply resent painting getting entangled in the run-of-the-mill life's routine. Art needs not be unambiguous and I Like this about it. I feel strongly for objects that leave us in uncertainty, because the link back to our subconscious and I like those works which evoke the sense of loss and helplessness at first contact.

The paintings are covered with patina or similar, which performs the same for a painting as the pedestal does for a monument - adds importance through the hint of distance it introduces.: they are worth while, the paintings - the patina suggests. Besides that, it adds an old-fashioned, out-of-date air to them.

I am most interested in those moments, when something eludes us, I enjoy looking at things, observing as such, without thinking about what I see. I have a name for this particular mode of visual activity - I call it: "the careless tourist's mode" (trybem patrzenia beztroskiego turysty).

Sławek Pawszak

curator of the exhibition Untitled, CCA Ujazdowski Castle, 2008

Sławek Pawszak has set an ambitious goal before himself: to do something new in painting or, at least, clear the ground for the painterly discourse and free the art of painting from the moss of contexts, which - according to the artist - has grown so thick, that art can hardly be seen from beneath its layer. His aim is to do painting as such; to show a painting in such a way that the viewer sees the image, gets past anything other than the image itself, disregards all references - sees anew. Pawszak sets about this task armed with Husserl's phenomenology with the valuable assistance of Rancierre's essay. In doing so, he reveals his disappointment with art's seeking refuge in the external context and discouragement with its ineffectiveness. He is, pretty much, fed up with the ritual conflicts staged in galleries.

What does Pawszak propose to deal with the state of affairs he disapproves of? The answer lies in the notion of fragment. It does not necessarily connote postmodern discontinuity, parallelism of cultures and existential space. Pawszak is interested in a fragment as seen, extracted from the physiology of selective, focalizing vision with unspecified boundaries. Within his art knowledge is rejected. He paints before he names.

What is the result of this operation? Pawszak paints fragments, enigmatic motives on the unpainted surfaces. In this way he rebels against the painterly instinct driven by horror vacui and pursues the utopia of a frameless - boundless - painting. He is interested in the essence. Behind each of his paintings there is a clear motive, each has a distinguishable reason for its having been painted. The rest is ‘background' and, as such, gets eliminated. Pawszak would rather leave it out, not paint it, and instead make an effort to extract the fragment, which thus becomes an independent entity. He resorts to painting from photographs. He even projects photographs onto the canvass as he paints. The knowledge does not go well with painting; we recognize abstraction in them, or - to put it differently - the motives are not readily verbalized, so that we are unable to say exactly what it is that we see. Pawszak is far, however, from performing a Rorschach test on his viewers, he does not give us riddles. Cognitive deficiency in this case is there to facilitate concentration on the essence of the art of painting, on the texture, without any digressing: what you see is what you get.

Then, just when we are persuaded out of reading paintings and into seeing them, Pawszak flips the script and shows us his mock-ups. To be sure, they are fragments as well. Fragmentary landscapes minutely recreated by the meticulous hand of a hobbyist appear before our eyes laden with narrative possibilities and sentimental associations. Hyperrealism? Or is it rather a compensation or the way to alleviate the representational deprivation that the artist set upon himself in the realm of painting? Pawszak certainly sees narration as the weed of painting. As the quest for the ‘pure painting' may seem don Quixote's and the very existence of any such entity as ‘painting' called into question, Sławek Pawszak's painting are a visible proof that his artistic future is everything but the question mark.