By the Mnemosyne Sea:
Tomasz Kowalski

Consonni Radziszewski is pleased to present the first solo exhibition of Polish artist Tomasz Kowalski in Portugal.

This exhibition is made up of still lifes, landscapes, and nudes. None of these works is a study of a concrete situation, place, or person. They have emerged spontaneously, without a sketch. They build a world set in a modernity from a hundred years ago, between the Dessau School and the Paris Symbolists, in cities of which our rural great-grandparents barely heard tell. A bit like pictures exposed for a century—so many things have changed, but the shapes of the rooftops and sun show it’s still the same place.

At any rate, whenever I write a text for Tomasz’s exhibitions (I wrote the first one twenty years ago), I think of the protagonist of his work. Back then, when we met, it was a character from a picturebook—stumbling, sticking out from behind furniture, painted with a distinctive sense of humor.

Now the protagonist has changed, as has the background. The artist is looking inward, into memories of places we’ve been and we haven’t. Into something that happened before we were born, that’s happening now, and in the world of the 1980s, where the images he recalls are made from splashes of color and overexposure. This is a world seen through an open balcony. A trip through town with the parents, on a May day, like today. Tomasz wrote he looked at Böcklin before painting. The Isle of the Dead has five versions, Hitler had one of them. An early Schlemmer stands on the other side, still using chiaroscuro and depth, from before the times he started painting flat figures. There’s a loneliness in these figures. They do things together, but don’t communicate. People are objectified, reduced to silent, spectral beings, like actors in a film you watch on your laptop, they blur while you nod off. In this cinema, phantoms watch phantoms. They do what we do. It all happens by the seashore.

Tomasz Kowalski was born in 1984 in Szczebrzeszyn. He studied painting at Krakow’s Academy of Fine Arts, today he divides his time between Antwerp, Warsaw, and his hometown. He debuted in 2006, back as a student, and since then his work has been shown at the Centre Pompidou, MUMOK in Vienna, S.M.A.K. in Ghent, the Art Museum in Saint Louis, and the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Arts in Warsaw. This exhibition inaugurates the activities of the Consonni Radziszewski Gallery in Lisbon.

Dawid Radziszewski