Tomek Partyka - Griffin Jonathan
X times X (E)
KORTE INHOUD
At first glance, Partyka's painting plunges us, without transition, into a crude universe, penetrated by impetuous and antagonistic forces. His works appear as deliberately damaged palimpsests, battered surfaces, sometimes crossed-out, sometimes roughly scratched, collaged and/or decollaged. Along with his roughly etched, resonant and incantatory words, Partyka invokes fragments of Old Master paintings. Caravaggio, Courbet, Matejko, Rembrandt, Rothko, Velázquez and Vermeer coalesce in his personal and anarchic rewriting of art history. Partyka blithely vandalises his canvases, frankly trampling conventions. "The more I destroy it, the better it gets", he says about his painting - not without provocation. It is not about seeing pure negation, encouraged by his sombre palette, but about dissident non-conformism against establishment art, a rebellious "NO", all powerful and proudly proclaimed. His process of methodical destruction is not only sourced in the 'décollage' technique of Wolf Vostell, protagonist of t...
