Essay
Contemporary Dark Surrealism & The Fold
A note on where this work comes from, how it is made, and what keeps returning in it: three decades of Polish painting that moved from city walls to canvas without giving up the gesture it started with.
I. From the wall to the canvas
The practice begins in Polish graffiti in 1996 — letterforms, spray control, and the discipline of working fast, outdoors and at scale. Nothing about that period was preparatory. It set the physical language of the work: a full-arm gesture, decisions made in a single pass, surfaces that carry the weather of the place they were made in.
What followed was a deliberate turn toward realism. Years of anatomy, portraiture and light, thousands of studies in graphite and ink. That technical foundation is what makes the later dissolutions legible: when a face fractures or a hand comes apart in these paintings, it does so on purpose rather than by accident. Dark surrealism here is not a stylistic costume — it is realism pushed until it admits what it was hiding.
Illustration and editorial commissions sharpened composition and narrative economy, and introduced paper as a permanent material. The studio then scaled up: large-format canvases, aerograph and spray paint, surfaces built over weeks. Graffiti, realism, illustration and painting still run in parallel. The practice, not a single style, is the subject.
II. Aerograph, spray paint and chiaroscuro
The core medium is mixed media on canvas: aerograph, spray paint, acrylic and drawing, worked in layers. The aerograph gives edgeless transitions — light that arrives without a visible boundary — while the spray can keeps the street's speed and grain. Between them sits glazing, sanding and re-painting, so that a form can be brought up, buried, and recovered again.
Light does the narrative work. Deep chiaroscuro isolates a figure in near-darkness and lets the eye find only what the painting is willing to show: a crowned head, a pair of hands, the ridge of a fold. Surfaces read as stone, cut paper or bruised skin depending on how far the light travels across them. The unease is built optically, not illustrated.
Scale matters to that effect. At two metres across, a painting stops being an image and becomes a space the viewer stands inside. This is where the wall work returns: a large-format surface addressed with a spray gesture, resolved with the precision of a drawing.
III. The mythology of the fold
The Paper Cutz cycle takes its logic from crumpled and folded paper. A sheet that has been creased cannot be made flat again — it keeps a record of every pressure applied to it. Painted at scale, those creases become faceted planes: faces built from folds, figures that look assembled rather than born, an origami geometry holding human weight.
Recurring motifs come from the city rather than from mythology books. Origami birds act as sentinels, the folded cousins of the pigeons that watch every street corner. Party masks and balloons hold celebration and threat in the same frame. Hands reach, bind and hold on. A figure moves at night, alert, in the manner of the writer who painted walls after dark.
Taken together, the works describe something ordinary and unsettling: people shaped by what has been pressed into them, still standing, still folded, still legible. That is the ground the current paintings — The Ritual, Party Boyz and The Night Stalker — are made on.