About Revolution of Things

Try to catch
heavenly body
one of these
so-called “at hand”

Miron Bialoszewski
About Revolutions of Things

Red Armchair, white cupboard, black round table, white clothes cover, laying on the floor coiled belt, unfolded camp striped bed…graphite semidarkness of attic. Opened to the yard window. Room with a view. Space of observations and discoveries. Banal and lyrical at the same time. Depth of sharpness sufficient to capture detail. To paint what is around. Near. What you can feel. My surrounding is my painting.

Maciek Duchowski for sure is not the first, for whom his own room or window view is a space of everyday observations, records, discoveries. And undoubtedly he is not the last one, who can read painting generality from commonplaces objects. Maciek Duchowski paints this, what is nearby: bed, wardrobe, bathtub, blue foil rubbish sack at the door. Those are not still lives. He is not interested in so-called “picturesqueness” of objects, which he chooses as a topic of his pictures.

Choosen objects not infrequently seem to be chosen accidentally, chosen because are “at hand”. Familiar, domesticated. Though there is not “a magic realism” in Maciek’s painting, but rather honest work to capture close things, to record their thruthfullness, this is that “familiarity” discloses in Maciek’s painting an anxious nature. A banality of ordinariness breaks poetical softness. Probably to hide a hesitation, that maybe painter should paint something more unusual. That “familiarity” is not enough. That canvas needs more magic and marvel. And here, as a defiance, everything is simple, natural and as if captured in a hurry, as we have sometimes impression, that this or that object has not enough frame and inconveniently displaced left or up.

But slapdash and hurry is only a pretence. Picture of Maciek are also devoid of final generalizations and univocal character nature typical for comic books. We sense rather aspiration for a hard – noticable balance, which is situated in a half way between over the modernity of painting sign and this, what is unit in color, shape and line. I paint what I know because I want to “know deeper”. I want to know a weight, a warmth and an energy of this.
Paradoxically in this what simple is a lot of complications. That’s why I’m lost in thought, and after go away, to feel proper distance to this what I’m looking at. I decrease and make keener a deep of sharpness. I look for a point, from which I will see enough, but not too much, to a detail not conceal this, what important. And to what is essentials not to be a generality. If painting has own logic, that is what I’m looking for. There must be yet a right point of red and yellow, the place in which a tension of plane has the biggest dynamism.

But paintings not exist lonely. Most willingly it discloses its affinity with photography. Painting of Maciek it is a painting”after-photography”. With shutters, but knowing a power of gesture. We live with media and in face of the media. We think in a way, which the media lays us. Television, internet, newspaper. Especially newspaper because of its “materiality” can particulary be an inspiration for painting. Maciek often uses newspapers as a ground. Sticked on a canvas they are not only a “undercoat”, but include also a transmission – in word, typogrphy – and are not indifferent toward painting motif. To capture this relationship is necessary to “read” a surface of a picture. Newspaper – perishability, transitoriness, relationship. This measured by moments. That’s why painting it is a trace, sign, thought – impulse, life – collection of moments.

Magdalena Wicherkiewicz, 2006