ABOUT EXHIBITION

Fairy Tale Worlds in Our Paintings
prof. zw. Krzysztof Skarbek and dr Piotr Saul

Opening: 15 April, 2023 (Saturday), at 6:00 to 8:00 pm

Curatorial tour with the Artists:
16 April, 2023 (Sunday), 1:00 - 4:00 pm

The exhibition runs until: 7 May, 2023

The philosopher Hans Georg Gadamer claimed that ".... thanks to symbolism, beauty beams with full light from a work of art. It embodies the harmony of being, which also includes elements of disharmony. That which is mysterious, transcendent, unspeakable is made visible in the very presentation of art."

At the exhibition organized by WorldartB Gallery (curator of the exhibition: Anna Katarzyna Borowczak, owner of WorldartB), together with STALOWA Gallery ( owner of the Gallery: Krzysztof Fabijański), at the premises of STALOWA Gallery in Warsaw, we present selected works of two outstanding painters:
KRZYSZTOF SKARBEK, a full professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Wroclaw, and his Assistant Dr. PIOTR SAUL.
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1 Krzysztof Skarbek. The artist, who is inscribed in the framework of New Expressionism and identified with the trans-avant-garde, is first and foremost an exceptional artistic individuality, one of the most colorful figures of Polish contemporary art, the Artistic Personality of Wrocław, including those known for performances bordering on performance and music, a long-time teacher; one of the creators of the Polish New Expressionism trend, and a wide spectrum of experience seems to allow the Artist to transcend the artistic conventions known to all. The artist has been delighting for years and his paintings are widely included in museum collections.

Krzysztof Skarbek presents a selection of painting works from two series: OBSERVERS WANT TO BE GOOD as well as OLYMPIC MYTHS OF THE OLYMPIC AGE and some smaller, recent works (2023), which with their symbolism refer to the culture of symbols, the transition from the old times to a new, better tomorrow, where there is love, kindness and invisible support of "alien" beings, or the opening of a new kind of games? Simplifications, irony, grotesque are tools in emphasizing the humor, the power of its therapeutic meaning, and on the other hand are supposed to reveal the drama of the phenomena presented.

Fairytale World presented by Krzysztof Skarbek is an act on the stage of a theater, a stage without curtains, full of metaphors. The artist creates his world of ideas based on primordial antinomies: figuration - abstraction, beauty - deformation (as an attempt to decipher the duality of human nature).

In turn, the dense and strong painting structure defines the dynamism and enigma of the dramatic and symbolic content, and one gets the impression that Krzysztof Skarbek attempts to resuscitate the ideal or tries to create it anew, a world based on a new order that will liberate the will, heart and soul, and above all free man from addictions, wars, quarrels, in order to fully win harmony.

Krzysztof Pulkowski wrote, among other things, that "the painting of this artist contains a prophecy of potential evil and good. (...) and victory and triumph over the unknown can only lead us to love, which is able to heal and cure everything, no matter how great the scale of the threat."

2 Peter Saul, an outstanding painter, extremely diverse in creation, a didacticist, who, despite his young age, can boast a great artistic output, from street art, graffiti, to the current of neo-expressionism to new fauvism. In Peter Saul's paintings we will see much more cycles, variety, graffiti influences. All that they have in common is a lot of positive emotions, from the rejection of the rush to modernity, blind pursuit, to the rejection of dependence on digitization and admiration for street art and urban space. In his paintings, the author metaphorically points out that we are surrounded by electronic "garbage" and the field is the urban jungle. Fairy-tale visions of gnomes and symbolic animal figures are to be transformed into beautiful and captivity-free fairy-tale, even fairy-tale worlds where everyone will feel safe.

1 The first series of Krzysztof Skarbek's THE ALIEN WANTS TO BE GOOD, most of the works in the exhibition are inspired by various visions of the 1960s, as well as the concept of "aliens", aliens, there are visible influences of old American films, pop culture, tribal cultures, utopian, American peculiar dream of prosperity, robots, capitalism, which gave the illusion to people that they can control everything, even nature, and "aliens" help to achieve goodness and happiness. The paintings show the rapid development of technology, capitalism, but also look far ahead to the utopian ideas of the future that pop culture has so fondly embraced. On the one hand, the society is oriented towards consumerism is to be warned of the danger of digitization, because it may or may not be a guarantor of human happiness. The works created in 2015-2016 strong in expression and color are even absorbing and cannot be passed by indifferently, and even trigger smiles from passersby.

These works are a conglomeration of ideas and aesthetics located at opposite poles, which the artist reinterprets, as well as artistically demystifies, and allows us to see the desires, as well as the fears of man in his eternal and ever-present aspirations, expressed in permanent, primordial archetypes. Aliens, pop culture icons, animals, knights, dinosaurs, robots, Indian chieftains, random objects and cartoon characters participate on the canvases. "Aliens" appear with unusual relationships, often alongside couples in love, with plotted events, often cheering them on, helping them, and not at all dangerous, as the titles of Krzysztof Skarbek's paintings themselves say.

Wild animals, on the other hand, function on an equal footing with the characters, are often kind, accompanying the lovers, in their normal life (during work, rest). However, it is far from a typical idyll, it is rather a vision of the world and the Artist's statement that we are not alone, and those we do not yet see do not mean that they do not help us in being a better person, their mission on earth, and it is enough to introduce a smile and kindness to make life a fairy tale.

A selection of several paintings by Krzysztof Skarbek, from the series MYTHS OF OLYMPE WOBE THE CONTEMPORARY( dated 2021) present a painterly transposition of the well-known and fascinating ancient mythology are to show in a new way the connections with elements of the world of modern civilization.

The entire European civilization is based on antiquity and from there we draw inspiration and teachings, and it is necessary to make a new transition to a new civilization, without getting rid of Greek and Roman roots.

"One of the many motifs of the fairy tale relationships linking ancient mythologies with the present and future in my story is the stage of interference in our, immediate environment and ourselves. These are undertaken studies on modifying human capabilities, perceptual and physical. Connecting the human nervous system to a global information system may be one of the next goals to guide evolution. The fusion of man and robot, i.e., creating a kind of cyborg of the future, may adequately be a reference to the mythical world of ancient hybrids that were characters with superhuman capabilities. The Minotaur, the Gorgon, or the Centaur appearing as deities, created under the silhouettes of half humans and animals in mythologies from ancient Greek Olympus, may be the prototypes of the idea of building futuristic androids. These include works titled "Perseus received from the wise Athena a shield to disable the beautiful Gorgon - Medusa, Apollo with Dionysus enclosed in a painterly circle of fire, surprise the combat android." Christopher Skarbek.

Allegories and metaphors used by Christopher Skarbek, known since ancient times, are applied in Skarbek's paintings and have hidden meanings, down to deep, psychological and spiritual content, signs and symbols.

The peculiarly processed reality is constructed with meandering lines and dashes. In many places, deliberately layered impastos of spots and contours should give an unusual effect of painting magic. His own achievements in experimenting with formal means, allowed him to combine painting and drawing techniques in a personal way.

Belief in goodness and love, conquer fear "throwing" people into the abyss, at the same time reopens the universe based on happiness and the victory of good over evil.

The author himself writes:" Participants in the current exhibition, can discover for themselves the investigative nature of creative exploration within painting. I try to organize the paintings on the canvases with an expressive gesture full of internal, tense moments. I emphasize the character of the plastic language with rich, structural painting matter. The optimistic, symbolic transformation of visual forms is revealed in this painting."

Pointing to the ambiguity of the developed compositions, one can quote the words of Mircea Eliade: "True is the painting as such, as a set of meanings - not one of its meanings. To translate an image into concrete terminology, reducing it to only one of the planes of reference, is worse than to mutilate it, is to nullify it as a tool of cognition."

"An important element of my creative strategy is also a sense of humor, which unloads the repeatedly pompous face of the subject of the gods ruling Greek Olympus. Disarming essence, irony is meant to point out the hidden, often grotesque, dramatic meanings of the depicted phenomena.(...).The work of painting is the most important thing for me, it is my life. Likewise. I also prioritize expressing rebellion against hypocrisy, Promethean struggle for values, changing stereotypes, humor and love." Krzysztof Skarbek, Wroclaw 2023.

2 Peter Saul

"Surreal multiverses" according to the study by Andrzej Mazur:
"Experiencing the work of Piotr Saul is accompanied by a feeling of fairy-tale-surreal contrast, which is created thanks to the intensity of the force emanating from within the extraordinary world presented reality that is not a monolith, scattered and pulsating with color, in its multiplicity being everything possible that can enrich, everything in contrast to nothingness, where by nothingness is meant ordinariness, everydayness and grayness. It is the same grayness that is intermingled with richness and excess in his paintings. These are things, buildings and situations that surround people every day, framed in a diametrically opposed and new way, Multiplication in Peter Saul's edition concerns, among other things, the multiplication of elements from fantastic contexts. The artist places characters from children's literature or animated films within his compositions. Elsewhere it is animals, sometimes depicted in the form of toys, but it is also elements drawn from the world of pop culture.Regardless of which contextual fan they are drawn from, the elements that make up these magical structures always seem to have in common that they merge as a whole. This is by no means a harmonious or toned-down fusion. One would sooner look for a dynamic transmutation here.

The result of these procedures is undoubtedly that the artist is able to keep the viewer with his paintings for a longer time, although the author himself declares that he introduces the viewer into a mysterious, fog-shrouded world, which for a while allows one to break away from everyday life implemented by the media and the environment", it is hard to resist the impression that this "fogginess", which can be synonymous with a sluggish and spilled mystery, is not a dominant feature in his work. After all, we have examples of such realizations as" Monkey rules" or "Explosion". Their feature is a multifaceted centrifugality that builds a dynamic picture of a puzzling multiplication, which is not merely a build-up. The elements placed in Peter Saul's representations organize a coherent vision, which is formed on the basis of disparate orders. Plant forms and trees do not grow from the ground, but from the mask, familiar from the cover of the band Daftpunk They grow without being uprooted.

The sooner one gets the impression that the vegetation is growing out of the silver-black mask in a smooth and rather slow manner. Nevertheless, it is certain that we are looking at a peculiar explosion. The artist uses a similar procedure in the work Explosion. In this case, the very title introduces a certain sense. If the term transmutation appeared earlier, it is necessary to expand the scope of the object to which the term can refer. Peter Saul manipulates time and tempo in his paintings, which certainly helps in that they not only please the eye, but also surprise.

Peter Saul's depictions(...) may have held the ganglia of memory, childhood and mature memories. They concern events, characters, objects, animals and plants, but they are also elements of other depicted worlds or pop culture icons. They are all included in a puzzling space of relationships. In this dimension, the transmutation of representation reveals itself as a dense conglomeration of these parts, in which they undergo fusion in space. More intriguing, however, is the second dimension concerning time.

"Monkey rules" is a painting in which we find a situation of parallel action, where the composition is divided into upper and lower parts. The artist has placed two situations and two op-eds in it. The lower plan tells about the static life of forest creatures, near an inhabited house surrounded by moss and undergrowth. It's a situation of steady and peaceful existence, a picture of existence where everything runs its natural course. In the upper foreground, we see personified animals against a backdrop of distended, colorful rays. Gory! holds a sword in his hand in a gesture of battle or victory, birds in a regular and compact formation fly in a direction consistent with the radiating pattern of the colorful sun. Everything here conveys the sense of dynamic transformation, revolution or lady for the world stable and secure, rather becoming anew, initiated by courage and faith that it will be better. inconsistency of the manifestation of temporality follows. What's more, the temporal transmutation that can be grasped in Peter Saul's paintings seems to relate directly to certain traits, moods, internal states, emotions, affects, characters or even identities.

We have before us an artist who, outside the sphere of painting, is defined by the versatility of his interests and passions, such as beatboxing and graffiti, and who describes his style as New Fauvism.

Certainly, attempts to read his intentions as a desire to spontaneously sample reality do not seem to be without accuracy. However, is this sufficient justification? A rhetorical question, of course, because, after all, art criticism cannot exhaust its subject. The work of Peter Saul is a perfect example of how a reference to something seemingly obvious at first glance can in fact turn out to be apparent. After all, we see a fantastic fairy tale, a wild fusion of colors, a universe of qualities that enrich the ordinariness of urban combat. We no longer get the impression that the gaze or situational Reality of memory and perceptual content has been reproduced by Peter Saul, undergoing imaginative transformation. All this seems obvious. Just as obvious will be the interpretation, preceded by the receiving experience, that the relationship with the art of this artist is a potential matrix, which can help waktach personal creations. Stuck in isolation from their original contexts, the contents of Piotr Saul's paintings are therefore abstract in a way, in the sense that being everything beyond gray, they mean nothing. They are pure material created to give meaning to the world depicted. When you say that they mean nothing, you mean that they are not intentional, not determined by strict meaning. It is, in a sense, an arrangement of dissonance, which, by giving pleasure, is supposed to lead to a consensus in anyone who wants to find or give meaning to his world."

ANDRZEJ MAZUR

Are we going to travel to space? Or having an intelligent robot that will relieve us of burdensome duties? Paradise is just around the corner, you just need to see it, and the vision of artificial intelligence seems to be good as long as we use it moderately. Whether this will happen, we will see, I think that many things we still cannot name or define in a proper way, and the worlds created by the Artists are supposedly better visions of the new world in which we will live, not only in dreams.

One thing is certain that their painting draws you in, makes you smile and even "hit" you with good energy.
I would like to thank the artists - Krzysztof Skarbek and Piotr Saul for the meetings and trust in joint action, and we invite you to the exhibition, study the titles and enter the end of a certain era of humanity, while enthusiastically and joyfully waiting for a new one.

Art should evoke positive emotions and I will stick to it (I personally like humor and idyllic impressions of undefined reality are close to me).

We invite you to the Fairy-tale World of two outstanding Artists: Krzysztof Skarbek and Piotr Saul (exhibition from 15/04 to 07/05/2023), creating in Wrocław (who will soon exhibit their works together, also abroad), and their fairy-tale worlds will not they will leave no one indifferent and introduce the power of new expressionism and at the same time reflection on the world, believing that its most important values are: love and friendship.

Anna Katarzyna Borowczak