Geppert.art.pl - Łukasz Patelczyk

Łukasz Patelczyk

A graduate of Poznań’s Academy of Fine Arts, he deals in painting and video. Currently an artist in residence in the painting studio of the Artists’ Colony in Gdańsk. Awarded in the 10^th edition of the Hestia Artistic Journey competition. He lives and works in Gdańsk.

In Łukasz Patelczyk’s paintings illusion blends with realism, at the same time clearly but still quite timidly steering towards abstraction. Patelczyk’s art may be defined as landscape painting. His landscapes present mimetic nature in a traditional, almost academic way. On the other hand, the fragmented nature shown in a narrow, tightly-packed frame, departs from figurativism and leans toward abstraction.

Patelczyk celebrates traditional patterns, his works are inspired by the biggest achievements of post-war painting. He creates suggestive variations on the theme of Richter’s hyperrealism or Grupa Ładnie’s banalism, also deriving from this trend. The monochromatism dominating in his works intensifies the visual experience of form, emphasizes the structure of the painting, focussing on the creative process, attention to detail, sensitivity to tonal nuances which constitute the traditional painting technique, thus offering an insight into the extremely interesting process of creation.

However, doubtless aware of his attachment to the “painterly” representation, Patelczyk introduces a deliberate counterbalance to his canvases, as if rebuking himself for the romantic sentimentalism towards this age-long and often underestimated artistic genre. So he introduces colourless, plain geometrical forms which intersect the representations, often covering their central part, making them less realistic on the one hand, and on the other allowing for an element of uncertainty, a riddle. In his new cycle, he quotes floral patterns adorning ceramic utensils. They are inserted in geometrical forms resembling coffin portraits of flowers. This combination creates an atmosphere of volatility and vanishing time, which – reinforced by the use of particular colour schemes and free painting gesture – becomes the main theme of his works.

Iwona Bigos