Dawid Czycz
Concept: Mariusz Horanin
Curators: Agnieszka Gołębiewska/Mariusz Horanin
Shefter Gallery, ul. Jabłonowskich 6, Kraków
Opening: 12.09.2020, 8. p.m
Golden Years is the latest series of paintings by Dawid Czycz, a pictorial story about our present. An era of excessive virtual stimuli. A world flooded with the colourful light from LED screens, where the ability to respond simultaneously to quick messages has become a key competency for survival. And they are a fantasy of our globalized pop culture. It’s an artistic look at the Zeitgeist and lifestyle of today. Probably at our future twenties, too. But everything in its order. And the various threads must unfold simultaneously, like the narrative in Dawid’s paintings.
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Dawid Czycz’s art employs the language of emoji and memes, or quick visual messages, which have taken over our digital communication in recent years. And with artistic virtuosity, he has created his own imaginary realm out of them. This is painterly figuration par excellence. Brave new worlds which are born from an intuitive response to real and virtual stimuli. In this process of artistic creation, the artist always follows his imagination: the imagination of an artist living in an era of digital communication and globalized pop culture. We have all come to love emoji, memes and GIFs – they’re just a click away and able to cheer us up instantly. But in Dawid Czycz’s work this joy is always critical of the world, which has turned before our eyes into a colourful pop culture world with liked promises of happiness. Dawid’s paintings tell of contemporary feelings of danger and our white-hot emotions. At the same time, there is a desire to show beauty, an intention expressive of the greatest madness of our times: if our world has become terrible, it should at least look beautiful.
Drifting in the virtual ocean, we try to find the balance necessary to survive in today‘s world. Our lifestyle is a continuous puzzle: everything keeps falling apart and rearranging itself, and it’s up to us to put it all back together. We are helped in this by simultaneity and multitasking: the ability to respond rapidly to multiple stimuli and run many narratives at once. Just as with the simultaneous narratives in Dawid’s pictures. For his dynamic compositions always retain a universal harmony. And, like smartphone screens, they glow with LED light, which has rendered our reality unreal in recent years. After all, we are living in the era of the LED Baroque. Welcome to Golden Years!
Mariusz Horanin
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