 Contrast settings |
 Link highlights |
 Font size |
 Spacing |
 Dyslexic friendly |
 Large cursor |
 Sitemap |
 Default settings |
Poznysz’s art operates on two principal semantic and compositional planes. The first confronts historical art, its conventions, patterns and inviolable status, while the second transposes classical painting into the language of contemporary tattoo iconography, enriching it with current themes and narratives. As Paweł Bień aptly notes in his catalogue essay: What on a human body is drawn with ink, in Tomasz Poznysz’s paintings becomes a commentary overwritten on the adopted story.
The ideological foundation of the artist’s work is Alessandra Lemma’s publication, which takes a psychoanalytic approach to the essence of body modification, including tattooing (“Under the Skin. A Psychoanalytic Study of Body Modification: Plastic Surgery, Tattoos, Piercing, Scarification”). Referring to it directly in the title of his painting series, Poznysz says of his inspiration: Lemma’s book shows that tattoo is something more than a decoration – it is a bearer of hidden narratives, frequently not expressed with words. In my paintings, tattoos became an interference with the body and the painting – they are deforming the figure, but at the same time they reveal what is hidden under the surface. They create a new layer of meanings, connecting private stories of the characters with universal problems of contemporary times.
Guided by psychoanalytic reflection, the artist externalises the internal on the surface of the body – memories of experiences, emotions and thoughts of the characters in his paintings. At the same time, by transcending temporal frameworks and drawing on their personal fates, he engages them in constructing narratives about present reality. Appropriating the space of their skin, Poznysz addresses inequality, discrimination, institutional violence and the climate crisis. Issues related to feminism occupy a particularly prominent place in his thinking. He therefore restores a voice to mythological and biblical martyrs and heroines who – through their often ambiguous histories – most fully expose the tensions along the power–victim axis.
By marking in black ink male and female silhouettes taken directly from Renaissance and Baroque works, the artist symbolically integrates on the canvas the biological and corporeal with the realms of reason and emotion. For Poznysz, whose conservation training and practice grant him deep insight into the secrets of historical painting, the painting itself is the point of contact between these two areas. The paint layer becomes, in his work, an analogue of human skin, while interventions in its matter (cracks, cuts, peeling and the re-adhering of “painterly scales”) act as equivalents of cuts, wounds and scars.
The exhibition will open on 28 August (Thursday) at 6:00 PM, accompanied by a DJ-set.
The exposition will be on view until 25 September 2025.
Curated by: Katarzyna Zahorska
