‘If you’re beside me, why can’t I see you?’
‘If you’re beside me, why can’t I see you?’
As I've been too ill/busy to review anything in Jan, I'd thought I'd revisit a companion text I wrote for Aleksander Mechlinski's solo show at Plataforma2 in 2022.
Aleksander Mechlinski’s seductively bright and cartoonish paintings are deceiving. When gazing at them for the first time, one notices a series of interconnecting logics at play, and it’s quite hard to determine where the viewer stands as we look on at them, amidst his sprawling network of references.
It starts at the thickly daubed pixel-like patterns forming his images. They are undeniably alluring surfaces that obfuscate and pulse into different Images, aided by the peculiar mix of marble dust, Portland Stone and oil paint that hold the subject in place like a candy-coloured weighted blanket. The impasto renderings jolt between abstraction and figuration, sculpture and painting, so confidently that the ease of movement leaves you feeling like you’re mindlessly flicking through your newsfeed or camera roll.
While the subjects and images within his work contain murmurs of the internet, they are more reminiscent of the wider change in image culture, and how the sharing, distribution, and mediation of images provides a newly formed level platform to history, allowing literate inhabitants to pluck and quote relational elements at their will. ‘The Dance’ by Henri Matisse, is, for instance, here reduced to an indigo copy, recalling a tattoo on the subject. Appropriating the bright fauvist palette, the visceral power and bodily energy is transferred into the work. A row of potted plants is meticulously rendered in series, the colour palette changes between each canvas, here the copying is done by the artist himself, across his own practice. The net is cast wide.
Beyond the coagulated materiality of his surfaces, Mechlinski imbues his painting with such vibrancy that this also reads as another tactic. They become intentionally insular worlds, clouded or overshadowed (not in a bad way) through his strategic employment of painterly gesture. Created by reducing found or stolen images from across a range of media through the use of a computer program, which are then translated to the canvas, his marks appear like pixels, but instead of each tiny mark coming together to provide greater visibility, it leaves the image at once legible and illegible, drifting in and out of focus.
You’d be forgiven in thinking these paintings are continuing the genres present throughout a generalisation of painting’s history. Correct, these are all symbols we have seen before, and that’s it: Mechlinski’s works are considerations on how images lose their specificity and uniqueness over time. Through their production, Mechlinski’s paintings appear to lessen that change, pulling apart the simplicities and ambiguities of these unlikely icons, and fixing them as agitated versions, pushing them back into the ebb and flow of images.
One can see the endeavour of painting semi-nude figures, animals, or plant scenes serially, as they are such as well-travelled paths, that the works become transcendental ideals. A semiotic game that stops these collected subjects and images being a signifier for anything in particular, and instead is readable as a metaphor of metaphoric meaning, signifying its own power of signification. They are, in effect, placeholders, as fundamentally arbitrary as (blank). This is what I mean about deception, this rhetoric suggests further overlaps or a sort-of circuit on an infinite loop. It could be described as an escape from visibility.
‘If you’re beside me, why can’t I see you’ one of the paintings asks from its title. It may be, as we look on, Mechlinski draws his legibility into an ever-tighter circle of relations, a more insistent and immediate set of meanings that moves his painting closer to something like everyday language.
See some of Alek’s more recent work here