35 years ago, Jacek Jarczewski presented his diploma project in painting, defended with honours, at the City Gallery in Wrocław. Today, already a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Wrocław, he is exhibiting his creative output from the last decades – a range of paintings produced in his own haptic painting technique – in the same place.
Showcased in Wrocław City Gallery from 27 October, Jacek Jarczewski’s ATTENTION TOUCH! haptic painting by Jacek Jarczewski exhibition shows specific development stages of his individual creative method, worked out over the 30 years of his artistic practice. On display are geometrised compositions from the artist’s early days, as well as works dominated by a fluid gesture from the early 2000s, along with pieces from recent years, rich in dynamic form and colour.
With his paintings, Jarczewski stimulates both the sense of sight and, in equal measure, the sense of touch. He expresses his inner feelings in colour, form and composition, as well as texture, which – depending on the emotions recorded on the surface – can either surprise with its dynamics and expression or create regular, harmonious arrangements of lines. The painter rebels against the common rigours applied to viewing works of art. Thus, to reveal the emotional climate of his paintings as closely as possible, he invites viewers to directly touch them.
By constantly developing his structural creative method Jarczewski has gained the status of an experimenter. He explores diverse painting surfaces and unconventional materials, and allows his paintings and their matter to succumb to the passage of time. In his search for the link between nature and art, he fully accepts his own works be colonized by mould or etched by corrosive substances.
The curator of this exhibition, Mirosław Jasiński, perceives this combination of senses necessary for viewing Jarczewski’s work as a return to the origins of painting. When talking about the particular “geology” of the artist’s paintings, he highlights that: […] after all, cave and rock drawings were created using the natural geological structures of stone, the texture of skin or bone.
The exhibition is on view until 18 November 2023.
Curator: Mirosław Jasiński