FILIP MARKIEWICZ

“Silence is louder than a revolution”

Opening Tuesday 07 June 2016 h 18.00

08 June - 16 July 2016

Monday 15.00 - 18.00

Tuesday - Friday 10.00 - 13.00 // 15.00 - 19.00

Saturday on appointment only

At each stage of its development, Markiewicz’s work can be defined by its rejection of gratuitousness. Is it characterized by proliferation? This is easily justified, as reality has a thousand layers. Is it dominated by theatricality as a “way of making”? Then it is to help the symbols and meanings get across.

The refusal of artifice, of style for its own sake—characteristics of the artist, and his signature—here becomes a program in its own right. It does so in the name of necessity, a superlative Necessity with a capital N, which could be described as both therapeutic and ethical. Through his works, Markiewicz documents our reality without deluding himself about the frontal or insidious barbarism that characterizes it; he speaks to us about an experienced world that is in no way idyllic, that distinguishes itself as much by its questionable seductions as by its irregularity, imperfection, hypocrisy, violence, inequality, and irrepressible taste for subterfuge. To create while reminding us of this, to create in order to remind us, by making the artist a witness, means to act as a revealing agent, a whistleblower, a healer. It means positing the principle of a potential therapy, a desirable improvement, an amendment. The ethic disposition of Markiewicz’s work, both directly speaking and sub specie aeternitatis, grounds in this tendency never to let go of the prey for its shadow, not to leave the spectator in peace, mainly because the first spectator of this work is the artist himself.

Paul Ardenne