Tomek Baran / ZZA KULISAMI / BBACKSTAGE

About

3 x recycling Łukasz Białkowski talks to Tomek Baran 

Ł.B.: The title of the exhibition at the UFO Art Gallery once again touches upon the specificity of your work: the use of industrial paints and the use of found objects. It is something you have already made your audience accustomed to, and what do they mean in the subtitle??  

T.B: I let the audience in behind the scenes. It is a bit like buying a film on DVD, with a half hour of bonus material showing the production process – the making of the film, rejected scenes or the director’s version. 

Ł.B.:Is figurative painting also a kind of behind-the-scenes presentation of a view usually inaccessible to the public? You have never shown works of this type before. 

T.B: Already halfway through my university course, I had given up figurative painting. Since 2007, I have not shown such paintings in end-of-year exhibitions either. It turns out that I am doing this for the first time in 15 years.  

Ł.B.: So, it’s a jubilee of sorts…  

T.B: Very much so [laughs]. 

Ł.B.: After 15 years, you are exhibiting a figurative painting for the first time and showing a bottom. Why precisely this part of the body?  

T.B: It is my own bum. I found the fragment of the door it is painted on opposite the flat of Marysia Ciborowska and Dominik Kopera, who run the UFO gallery. I took it to the studio and wondered how to elaborate on it if the bathroom door and window were already finished. I thought I would paint a bare bottom because that’s what you can see there. And then I added the caption MEKRURY [MERCURY].  

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Ł.B.: Was the period of the past two years particularly significant for you?  

T.B: The last solo exhibition I did, Claustro at Le Guern in 2020, was the closure of a particular phase for me. On some of the paintings shown, I had been working even since 2013. That it was a reworking of myself, I realised only after that exhibition. And that is probably why, at the UFO exhibition, I’m showing things that are quite different from the earlier ones. 

Ł.B.: The exhibition at Le Guern was, therefore, for you, the closure of a period that had actually lasted since you started to function in the gallery circuit fully.  

T.B: I had my first gallery exhibition in 2010 while I was still at university. But things really took off for good just around 2013. Anyway, during the first years after my degree, something also changed a little bit in my work because I stopped using tempera, rejected the typically flat painting supports and started experimenting with spatial canvases. My residency in Vienna also gave me a lot. That’s when I started using spray paint, for example. 

Ł.B.: Since the stage that goes back to your student days has closed, does that mean that you have now begun to define yourself as a mature painter?  

T.B: Not necessarily, just something came to a close. I don’t know... 

Ł.B.: You probably know, but you don’t want to say because it’s too personal... I guess you don’t want to go behind the scenes after all...   

T.B:  (laughs). 

Let’s just confine ourselves to stating that the exhibition at UFO is, in a way, a “new beginning”.  

It initiates something new based on what has gone before. 

<excerpt from Łukasz Białkowski's interview with Tomek Baran "3xrecycling">