Overgrowing with routine, especially in your 30s, a cobweb, which should be torn off your face once in a while. The elusive absurdity of the human situation, we forget about it every day – the canvases by Cyryl Polaczek remind us. It’s a leisurely walk across different situations, whose sources are sometimes very concrete, like the tangibility of an insect on the wall, on a window sill, the tangibility of the touch of someone’s hand, situations purposefully not closed in any cycle (this non-cyclicity – it’s essential). Some other time an escape from meaning; the aim: not to mean. Or at least to wander off meaning, postpone it, block it, which is obviously not easy. For comparison: the conventionality of aims, which are set in so-called everyday life, so the life of the middle and working classes, a life almost devoid of imagination, orientated towards self-replication. Without going beyond what is most probable, risk-averse and sometimes simply safe; beyond task orientation and the resultant automatism; many modes of thinking and feeling, dulled by history and adulthood, including good old surreal thinking (the times when humanity as a whole, although rather a white masculine satiated West, still set itself some sophisticated goals), have an opportunity here to appear once again. When I look at these works, I also simply think: “the many-sidedness of this painting, the range of painting skills is dope”, well, at least for me, but after all, I think and write this as a recognized and popular author – so I must be right, mustn’t I? A number of severances rather than references, each time the maximum squeezing of separate energy out of these meaningless pieces of canvas or another plaster. Sometimes an artwork seems shallow and banal to me, but in a cool way, like a press advert from the 1990s, not seen for decades, as if you bump into it with already disaccustomed eyes, everything rather more intentional than not. A careless blue of a large high heel, the harlequin by Cyryl Polaczek. Paint like a warm summer wind from a bodice-ripper which is forking between the legs of the main heroine, who is standing on a grassy cliff and gaping at the ocean, biting her lips and awaiting what the future holds, the breeze is pleasantly twining, fanning, the love boat is leaving the harbor on the 14th of February.

Łukasz Zawada