Karol Palczak: A Fire Every Day

Karol Palczak: A Fire Every Day
Galeria Śladowski, Kraków 24.05.-14.06.2019
Curator: Mariusz Horanin

If there is an artist who feels an insatiable need to paint, it must be Karol Palczak. Always in a rush. Fast so that the brush can keep up with the idea. It sounds like a description of an artist living in a big city, while Karol lives far from the limelight, in his native Krzywcza near Przemyśl. It is a conscious decision because that’s where freedom is, with no Krakow spleen or city noise. A lot can be written about the place and it can be mythicised as a part of Poland’s magical provinces. And, to some extent, it’s true. But the place is also only three hours’ drive away from Krakow, where the artist studied at the Academy of Fine arts and where he often visits, for example, to attend exhibitions by his painter friends. Krzywcza is a hermitage that Karol often leaves, but is always glad to return to. In the paintings one can identify the landscape of the San River, which flows near his home, and the hills surrounding the area. So much for the topography of this beautiful place. After all, the rest happens inside the head.

Karol Palczak | Our Great Home Is On Fire | oil/metal/wood | 65x56cm | 2019 

Karol Palczak | Fire | oil/canvas | 150x105cm | 2019

Karol Palczak’s latest paintings burn. Are these boys from Krzywcza running around a bonfire burning in the field, or rather rappers from video clips dancing in the smoke and among flames? Anxiety, or perhaps joy, vitality and energy? Or maybe the atavistic attraction of fire, because the element stimulates everyone. Everybody always wants to get close to the fire. The figures in the paintings are dancing their tribal dances, lethargic dances and the ordinary dances of young people who are happy that something cool is going on. Today, fire is literally everywhere, it’s enough to sensitize your eye to it. It burns in video clips and commercials. It also burns on the screen in a live coverage of street riots in some unknown part of the world, or – an unimaginable thing – as it consumes the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris.

Karol Palczak | Karol In the Smoke | oil/metal/wood | 49x57cm | 2019

Karol Palczak | Deadly Smoke| oil/canvas | 130x85cm | 2019 

Karol Palczak | Flame | oil/metal/wood | 45,5x50cm | 2019

This sight can be understood as a symbol of the destruction of harmonious beauty or a symbol of the collapse of old values. Let us bear in mind, however, that fire also means rebirth, it heralds the beginning that will emerge from the ruins. So why does the artist show us fire? What’s supposed to emerge from it? 

Karol Palczak | Autodafe | oil/metal/wood | 50x68cm | 2019

Karol Palczak | Iwan/Burning Bush| oil/metal/wood | 40,5x24cm | 2019

Karol Palczak | Pink Fire | oil/metal/wood | 50x48cm | 2019

When one asks Karol Palczak about his paintings, one is immediately struck by the personal tone of his comments. It is simply truth that he wants to convey to us and that is so important to him. For we are talking here about artistic integrity and feelings, which have accompanied the artist from the start. They are essential to his art, which, in every gesture and at each stage of the creative process, is pervaded with the need to release emotions and to emanate truth. From the very inception of the painting on a technological level, the artist wants to be in control and do everything alone. That is why, like the old masters, he used to prepare the paints himself. What is also genuine is his constant fascination with the painting of Rembrandt, who was a master of chiaroscuro. Karol is also an unequalled painter of light. The paintings in his new series are virtually filled with a light that explodes the painterly matter and resembles the LED light from smartphone and laptop screens. 

In order to achieve this luminosity, Karol Palczak paints his pictures according to the Baroque rules of pictorial technology and experiments, as did the old masters, with the use of metal plates as a medium. This complicated technological process, which involves the application of many consecutive layers of paint and thus enables strong modelling with chiaroscuro, is still partly shrouded in secrecy. And let it stay that way.       

Karol Palczak | Czesiek's Ford | oil/metal/wood | 33x51,5cm | 2019

In the A Fire Every Day series, the artist has also scaled his imagination. Having started his career with small-format paintings, he now tells his stories in much larger works. But even those first, smallest pictures were supercharged with painterly matter and there was nothing of the miniature or small-scale safety about them. They were characterised by extraordinary precision and exquisite drawing. In his latest works, the brush travels more freely, and the sweep of the extremely vibrant pictorial gesture is more expansive. This is painting par excellence. Figurative painting is now booming and certainly reflects the spirit of our times, which the new communication technologies have turned predominantly into a culture of the image. The image seen in LED light. The work of Karol Palczak is an example of modern figurative painting, imbued with emotion, light and the desire to show beauty. 

   
       

Karol Palczak | Sweet Lady/Burning Tree | oil/metal/wood | 50x48cm | 2019

So, to return to the question: Why does the artist show us fire? And what’s supposed to emerge from it? It may be useful to recall Karol Palczak’s exhibition ‘Bhagvan’ in 2017, which was organised by his painter friends at the Potencja Gallery. The centrepiece of the exhibition of works set in winter scenery was the large-format painting Snowman, which a year later won the Grand Prize at the 1^st Krakow Art Salon. The eponymous Snowman stands completely alone and seems to be really looking at us with his eyes of coal. We almost believe that it has feelings too, that it’s more than just a heap of snow. Painted with impasto, it shimmers with that special kind of blue that makes the colour in the picture nearly phosphorescent. The Snowman now endears itself to us, now fills us with sadness and sympathy for his solitude. We don’t know what’s going to happen to it – the only certainty is that it will melt with the coming of spring. 

Karol Palczak | Fluorescent Lamp In the Stable | oil/metal/wood | 25x39cm | 2019

Karol Palczak | A Prayer In the Larder II | oil/metal/wood | 23x27cm | 2019

The Snowman is a portrait. Perhaps a symbolic self-portrait like Józef Chełmoński’s famous painting Cranes from 1870 (Gallery of 19th-Century Polish Art in the Sukiennice, National Museum in Krakow), painted at the start of his great career. The picture shows a flock of cranes at the crack of dawn, preparing to migrate before the approaching winter. As the graceful birds rise from the ground for the long flight, our attention is drawn to the lonely crane with a broken wing. Invested with a multitude of symbolic meanings, the cranes stood for Chełmoński’s longing to go to distant Munich, following his friends who had won the recognition of art critics before him. In the case of Karol Palczak, this much can be said: if the Snowman has melted, it’s the artist who has done the job, by starting a fire every day. 

Mariusz Horanin

Karol Palczak | Snowman | oil/canvas | 170x150cm | 2017
Grand Prix at 1^st Krakow Art Salon 2018

Karol Palczak, A Fire Every Day – paintings

Galeria Śladowski, opening 24 May 2019 at 19:30
Curator: Mariusz Horanin

On the night of 15 April 2019 the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris burned down. But that’s not the kind of fire we had in mind. Thinking about the concept of the exhibition, we meant the sense of constant anxiety and danger that has always accompanied our lives. And recently its presence has been felt even more intensely.  

A fire every day. The moments in the middle of the night and day when we are frozen with emotions and the moments when we suddenly rush forward for an obscure purpose. All those fires breaking out as a result of the ruthless rules of advanced capitalism, complicated and fragile interpersonal relations and the ongoing flood of redundant information from glowing screens. Real and virtual fires. Fires that you have to put out every day.    

Maybe it’s just a matter of sensitivity. A matter of our hypersensitivity. Maybe the world is really on fire? And what will emerge from this fire of our times? In art, it will definitely be a new aesthetics. Probably full of the light in which we see the world today on our smartphone and laptop screens. The aesthetics of LED light. And sometimes that of real fire. But, despite the fact that there is a fire every day, we take the view that people should at least get a kick out of it. Especially on an opening night.

           Mariusz Horanin

Smiling at the private paradise of his dreams, smiling, smiling...

Our world has taken so many steps in the wrong direction.

Are you listening to me? You cannot win this way.

Follow the Rules.

Play the Game.

Be Happy.    

(Aldous Huxley) 

All texts from the exhibition catalogue:
Karol Palczak.
Codziennie jeden pożar. Malarstwo. A Fire Every Day. Paintings
Galeria Śladowski
Exhibition 24.06. - 14.06. 2019
Curator: Mariusz Horanin
Patronage: Dell'Arte Foundation, Nocny Art Patrol and Miasto Kraków
Kraków 2019

Karol Palczak (1987), a Krakow painter who lives and works in Krzywcza. Graduate of the Faculty of Painting of the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow. Diploma work completed under the supervision of Professor Janusz Matuszewski (2015). Winner of the Grand Prize at the 1^st Krakow Art Salon 2018. The work of Karol Palczak is an example of modern figurative painting, imbued with emotion, light and the desire to show beauty.