Artists

Łukasz Korolkiewicz

Press release

The presented paintings were created between 2022 and 2026, and the vast majority of them have never been shown before. At first glance, they appear to be realistically painted, serene landscapes against which human figures appear. They are dominated by the lush greenery of plants, bathed in the afternoon sun. Upon closer inspection, however, Korolkiewicz’s paintings reveal further secrets, hidden in the interactions between their characters, in those fragments of the scenery not visible to the viewer, and in the reflections in the windows. Korolkiewicz continues to draw inspiration from his own photographs, they serve the artist as material from which he composes his own scenes, extracting images full of tension from a seemingly uninteresting reality.

As Kinga Kawalerowicz writes: With a sensitivity to colour temperature, green, the most complex and nuanced of colours, shimmers here in an infinite variety of shades. (…) One feels almost sensually the light and air these paintings breathe, the warmth of the sun or the breeze creasing the surface of the water. Looking at these paintings, we think less and less about the fact that the author has used photography. He still uses photographs, but this is obliterated in the course of the work, absorbed by the painting process. The artist does not try to be meticulous with details. Of course, when viewed from a distance, the paintings create the illusion of reality, but when viewed close-up, they reveal the traces of brushstrokes, the structure built up from the arrangement of colour patches, the “living” tissue created during the work on the painting. The artist’s imagination creates images from real-life scenes in a manner similar to the way dreams are formed. Real scenes overlap or are arranged in sequence in such a way that they cease to be realistic. Kinga Kawalerowicz notes that, Korolkiewicz’s paintings are often reminiscent of a frozen film frame – something has happened before and something will happen later.

The painter captures the moment “in between”: it can be seen as an attempt to record a particular sensation, that moment of realisation of “essential reality” – he freezes the vision “in a still point” of his epiphany. This is how the painter himself puts it: “My work is a careful observation of the world, an analysis of reality in terms of an image yet to be created. It is a kind of exhausting hunt for a vision. An obsessive painterly gaze, very subjective. The choice is decided by my ‘inner eye’.” “But the most wonderful instances – epiphanic. situations – are when, in a sudden moment of illumination, we see something extraordinary. We can photograph it, freeze it, then paint it, process it. I have some of such canvases… Certain moments cannot be provoked or created artificially. They have to happen in reality. I don’t paint any objective reality – after all, does that even exist? – but what I carry deep inside me; then I sharpen my gaze to the message of the world.”