ADAM KOZICKI. WAR OF ALL AGAINST ALL

In his latest exhibition, Adam Kozicki looks at the pulsating, nervous rhythm of the modern Internet — a space where culture wars are constantly smoldering, and broken streams of information create emotional tensions, blurring the boundaries between fact, opinion and emotion. The artist looks at the web as a space where disputes about value and identity collide, but also our desires related to what is socially allowed and accepted.

The starting point for the exhibition is online reality shows and round-the-clock broadcasts, for example, Fishtank LIVE, in which participants, wanting to attract viewers, deliberately exceed the accepted language and customs norms. Their formula is based on the confinement of a group of people in a space observed by cameras 24 hours a day. Participants are often people with diverse political views, whose participation in the program is primarily motivated by economic reasons. Viewers not only follow the development of events, but also directly influence the course of the program through paid messages, tasks and other forms of interaction. At the same time, the broadcast becomes a reality show, a performance, a social experiment and a laboratory of power relations. Kozicki, however, does not treat these phenomena as an exotic curiosity. He also does not judge them from the level of moral superiority. Rather, it shows a world in which the boundaries between reality and spectacle are increasingly blurred. In digital communities, he sees microworlds offering participants a sense of belonging and acceptance, a chance to improve their material situation.

His portraits and claustrophobic interiors resemble scenographies devoid of a stable narrative, and the characters who inhabit them remain ambiguous — they are conglomerates of identities that constantly mutate, penetrate and disintegrate under the influence of successive projections. The titles of his paintings can bring to mind the figure of an anti-hero, a loner exceeding accepted norms. However, the artist sees his characters differently: as people in whom a certain kind of surplus accumulates - emotions, stimuli and tension, but also pleasure. In evocative portraits, faces seem familiar and alien at the same time, as if they belonged to many people at once, like avatars circling between platforms and scenes. These paintings become at the same time a kind of emotional and social portrait, in which the artist recognizes his own experiences and those close to him.

The artist paints with oil paint and acrylic ink applied to the canvas using an airbrush. In this way, it creates dense textures on the surface of the picture, due to which the portrayed figure merges with the background of the surrounding domestic space. Although the reference point for these works is a world dominated by digitally generated and distributed images, Kozicki does not use artificial intelligence as a tool for building a painterly composition. All the performances are created from the imagination fed by the memory of images, experiences and emotions, and then materialize in one of the most traditional media of art.