Paweł Jarodzki

The world of ideas, land transformed by thought. A new body of work by Wrocław based artist Paweł Jarodzki explores the spontaneous links of memory and fact through a process of mapmaking. Deconstructing physical maps, reassembled as a collage of found materials and images, symbols working together to create a psychogeographic network of possibilities. The nostalgia of the paper map becomes a metaphor for the absurd in an era of blockades, sanctions and satellites.

“[…] I remember visiting a friend of mine recently who got himself a GoPro. So, he made a party to show us the recording from that camera and really for 20 minutes there was just water and the man breathing heavily, everyone started yawing, and he insisted, there will be a tortoise on the right […]”

Driven by the out-of-context quotation, Świat nie istnieje presents a cryptic world of beauty and intrigue imagined with a painter’s delight. Beautiful and biting, mocking and morose, the series weaves together symbols of death and minerals. The land itself an arcane arena where cartoon skulls are good for a laugh and esoteric figures become references to lure our unexamined assumptions. At the disconcerting boundary between thought and belief, our most potent memories run parallel to the lines drawn in the sand, notions of territory, history, and national borders fragment into a world of nothingness.

Adapting the logo from the fictional newspaper “Gotham Globe” a media outlet known for printing the nightly mischief of masked avengers, renamed and proclaiming, “the world does not exist.” The title references the historical attitude of Solipsism, a philosophical idea that nothing can be certain outside of our own minds. Existential inflections lace a collection of repeated visual motifs, subtly manipulated and applied in series. An oil drum, a rose, and the allegorical skeleton. References to physicality and terrestrial resources are exaggerated into melodramatic tropes. A backhanded reference to the painting tradition of vanitas, both questioned and legitimized through re-iteration, while ironically reduced to ornament in typical Jarodzkian fashion.

An artist, author and educator Pawel Jarodzki (b. 1958 Wroclaw, Poland) has developed a unique lyrical voice over his 30-year career, delivering criticism and comedy through exhibitions and comics alike. A Professor of Painting in the Wroclaw Academy of Art and Design and a curator at BWA Wroclaw. Co-founder of the legendary LuXuS art group in Wrocław (active 1984-present) Jarodzki’s work is featured in the collection of Zacheta National Gallery of Art, while exhibited throughout Poland and Europe, his 2014 comic edition “Kompletna historia wszechświata ze szczególnym uwzględnieniem Polski” (A Complete History of the Universe with Particular Emphasis on Poland) was published by Korporacja Ha!art.