Centro Internacional das Artes Jose de Guimaraes
Guimaraes, Portugal

2014

Black Star is the first solo exhibition in Portugal, of the work by Jarosław Fliciński. It is a large-scale intervention, that showcases the artist’s recent work for leading international contemporary art institutions: a project that aims to expand the operating field of the pictorial language, combining acute sensitivity to architecture with proficient wall painting, that extends beyond the picture frame and ventures into architectural space.

Jarosław Fliciński has designed an intervention that chronicles his own personal transformation. Indeed, this exhibition embodies his life experience over the last four years, after he moved to the small village of Esteval, between Loule. And Faro, in the Algarve, thus engendering a period of radical transformation in the inner habits and practices of his work.
Hence, spanning different formats and media, we pass from the gigantic to the miniscule, navigating between two levels: – Design, materialised by the set of drawings, in which the artist explores variations on very simple geometric forms, in a practice of repetition and difference, and a diverse set of objects collected in houses or outdoors, especially on the beach – in a kind of archaeological practice, of attention and openness to signals that come from afar and which announce themselves as being potentially transfigurational; – Construction, through use of the wall as a mechanism for dialogue with the architecture of the space, which in this case is divided into two distinct typologies.
On the one hand, transposition of an organic geometric drawing, a kind of anamorphism which acts on the spectator’s perception of the space around him, contracting and expanding the Euclidean geometry of architecture. On the other hand, the construction of two mural paintings that stand out from the wall, redefining the space, and which explore an entire meditative practice, that stages a dialogue with the history of geometric painting, a kind of spiritual exercise engendered as a performance, for which the artist had to build his own tools. In these paintings, there is an atmospheric density, which results from the superposition of several layers of different coloured paints that transport the spectator into an almost hypnotic state, in which different perceptual dimensions coexist.
The last part of the exhibition is a video projection that documents a luminous and optical effect, which echoes and reverberates, with disarming simplicity, the mural painting that the artist produced in a nucleus of the permanent collection: a white star, that draws, in the exhibition route, a kind of circle or spiral that represents an idea of a new beginning or return which, ultimately, perfect illustrates his recent career.

Nuno Faria