Accidental Pleasures (4) — A Tiger Has Almost Devoured Me — Bartek Buczek, Radek Szlaga
The title refers to boasts and shredded stories, fragments of which cling to other stories, complementing or widening them. It sounds like a citation from the storyline of an adventure book, travel film or shaman’s initiation story, where an episode of being devoured by a wild animal is an indispensable element of the plot. According to its assumptions, the protagonist must be torn apart in order to be reintegrated as a stronger or even indestructible hero. The amok typical for that thread resembles symptoms of arctic hysteria which can be accompanied with convulsions and a tendency for aggressive behaviours. During the attack a sick person is lamenting or stripping naked, shouting, crying, imitating animal or bird voices, running chaotically, rolling around in the snow, or jumping into the water, and after a few minutes falls asleep deeply, from what would awake with no disturbance.
summary of ‘Accidental pleasures’ The catalogue summarising the cycle of exhibitions ‘Accidental Pleasures’, which was held at the Small Hall of the BWA Contemporary Art Gallery in...
Accidental Pleasures (3) — Enthusiasts — Kuba Dąbrowski, Katarzyna Skorobiszewska, Paweł Szeibel Three artists are invited to take part in another edition of the cycle Accidental Pleasures. Unaffected gestures which can transfer us into a gallery...
Accidental Pleasures (2) — Strolls in Melted Chocolate — Bańda, Markiewicz, Smandek, Szymanowska Melted chocolate is hot and burning; it can’t be touched unless it starts to become cold and hard. Its liquid state evokes the danger connected with...
Accidental Pleasures (1) — Conceptual Pleasures — Gayer, Grospierre, Skąpski, Sztwiertnia, Ziomkowska The starting point for the cycle of exhibitions, which was held at the small hall, the alternative exposition space of the BWA Contemporary Art Gallery in...
The common exhibition of Radek Szlaga and Bartek Buczek shows at similar threads in their creation. These artists, using various means of expression, collect the phrases torn from their context and the surprising compositions of figures and situations, as if skipping from one channel to another, diving in the landfill in frantic search for the original raw and recyclable materials. In effect, they reconstruct the incidents which became embedded in their memory. They are lighting a fuse. Their littered Sarmatian imagination is bubbling and waiting for an eruption. On the charred ruins after the blow up they find the glowing shapeless forms which resemble nothing known. Their works — like the reflections seen at the bottom of a well — refer to other copies which are covered like successive little jewel cases placed one in another. These tropical-arctic fairy tales — full of lures, extravaganzas of colour, bluffs and false prophecies — can be stretched and cut into pieces like candyfloss.
Buczek is experimenting with texts, composing his story from fragments stolen elsewhere. A boy in a jacket, the figure created by him, poisons a spring, gives in to be burnt with a red-hot branding iron, and runs into literary troubles from which he would always emerge unscathed. Models of Szlaga’s painting, which come from distant places in peripherals, are significantly crumpled. Mutated grotesque history and geography explode in his canvases, disturbing the routines and closed structures of the pigeonholed perception and systematised knowledge. The artist freely effaces the blackboard, preparing it for writing down new formulas which don’t use any of well known rules.
Immersed in the state of self-enhancing oversensitivity and euphoria, Buczek and Szlaga pull out the scraps with impunity. They throw the stolen components into a concrete mixer. Then they watch how the firework of mixed citations, simulations and substitutes is pulsating.
Curator: Marta Lisok
