Tomek Partyka

At first glance, Partyka's painting plunges us, without transition, into a crude universe, penetrated by impetuous and antagonistic forces. His works appear as deliberately damaged palimpsests, battered surfaces, sometimes crossed-out, sometimes roughly scratched, collaged and/or decollaged. Along with his roughly etched, resonant and incantatory words, Partyka invokes fragments of Old Master paintings. Caravaggio, Courbet, Matejko, Rembrandt, Rothko, Velázquez and Vermeer coalesce in his personal and anarchic rewriting of art history. Partyka blithely vandalises his canvases, frankly trampling conventions. "The more I destroy it, the better it gets", he says about his painting - not without provocation. It is not about seeing pure negation, encouraged by his sombre palette, but about dissident non-conformism against establishment art, a rebellious "NO", all powerful and proudly proclaimed. His process of methodical destruction is not only sourced in the 'décollage' technique of Wolf Vostell, protagonist of the Fluxus movement, but also in the tradition of punk culture, the sovereign of all transgressions. Through this assumed nihilism, symbolized by an 'X' of denial, Partyka paints quasi-primitively, with loaded and savage brushstrokes, mixing feathers, animal bones and human hair. It is certainly irreverent and ironic to paint a portrait of the illustrious Jan Matejko incorporating hair, but above all, it reveals a vision that is committed to the history of art, a contemporary artist's desire to reclaim an artistic legacy that takes him from east to west. Partyka is literally, physically and metaphysically implicated in his canvases. His entire ouvre can be understood as a form of self-portraiture. It is, indeed, a genuine quest for personal identity, motivated by a reflection on existence, which is woven into his canvases. What may seem an anarchic protest is, in fact, a sophisticated and intelligent composition, resounding like a philosophical conundrum. Not unlike the generation of New Realists, shaken by th