Marcin Maciejowski - Unsettled Matters

About

For Maciejowski, the act of painting is a way to think about the world: to notice people and moments, from his life, from the media, and from history, that he wants to spend time with by making a painting. In an interview [for the Polish art magazine 'Notes'] Maciejowski refers to an interview with the artist Cezary Poniatowski in which he is asked the question “So what is painting to you?”. Maciejowski’s own answer to this question was to imagine a formula for creating a painting, that factored in time, the body of the painter, the stimulants taken and the weather. He described a set of conditions that convey a hard and prosaic pragmatism. A kind of mocking, of how ‘creativity’ may or may not occur ­ and this satirical tone does underlie some of the work he makes. Yet these things are also fact: the completion of a task is effected by the environment that it takes place in and the person who is undertaking it. But what is perhaps most important in this formula is the ‘time’. The time Maciejowski spends making a painting (which he does whilst listening to audio books to engage his conscious mind in another world, not the ‘content’ of the painting) is perhaps the reason why the skin he creates is emotional: as it is the expression of his own embodiment in that moment, and his own psyche, both conscious and unconscious. So these paintings, that are portraits of others, are perhaps also self-portraits too.