Niezawodni | Wojtek Kubiak

Artist

Wojtek Kubiak

ABOUT EXHIBITION

On his first exhibition in the art agenda, Nova Wojtek Kubiak, a young and very promising Krakow artist, will present six oil paintings from the Niezawodni cycle.

Kubiak, known for his extremely realistic canvases, puts in question the status of image and representation in the case of the latest works. Created on the basis of images transferred to the canvas using a projector or a grid, they are painted and finished only in certain fragments. Only these fragments imitate reality in a decisive way and are a real show of painting skills. In addition to them, the „abandoned” by the artist extends only a sketchy drawing. Through this surprising self-restraint, Kubiak exposes the painterly illusion he has previously precisely built and reveals the secrets of his technique.

It also reveals its role as an entity with decision-making power. It is the artist who chooses the models, sets them to the photographs, selects the appropriate frames from which the image is created and finally decides what will remain unspoken, unfinished.

The protagonists of these canvases are men – of different ages, of different looks and stature, dressed differently. Also their reactions to the situation in which they had to undergo the artist’s manipulations, bend to his will, turned out to be different. Portrayed singly or in pairs, they present very diverse emotional states: from embarrassment, through embarrassment, intimidation to relaxation and unrestricted freedom.

Kubiak allowed himself a kind of provocation against them. By imposing certain gestures and poses to them, he tried to get them out of comfortable patterns of thinking and behavior. Striking at their sensitive point, in their own sense of masculinity, he carefully observed the attitudes they take. The result is a series of paintings from which a surprising, ambiguous and complex image of a modern man emerges.

The artist talks about the pictures that make up this presentation:
These are male portraits presented in the photorealistic convention.
However, we can not quite talk about a completely illusory transformation of reality, because at a special moment the picture is „abandoned” by me.

In this way two painting ideologies collide: masking the fact of subjective artistic creation and complete deciphering and exposing.

In addition, these are portraits that are a partial collection of gender beliefs commonly constructed in society.
Masculinity as a performance, as an action and constant repetition of specific rituals, aimed at naming, classification and inclusion in a specific group, is acceptance of submission to authority and convention, being a transcendent, subject, mind, logos, day, logic, intellect, etc.

Negotiation occurs not at the ideological level of the imagination, where everything functions as a „natural” necessity, but in the space of everyday life, here nothing is universal and unambiguous, a man is not just identifying with one of the heroes of popular culture (Rambo), identification of an internal, individual voice with an external mechanism of forcing.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog of essays [not] [] by Marcin Wilk, where the true east meets west and west with the real erection of Sławek Shuta, Ciacho Robert Król. The catalog contains reproductions of works presented in the nova gallery and as part of the 7th Competition. Eugeniusz Gepperta in Wrocław.