False Views is a monographic exhibition of paintings by Łukasz Stokłosa, presenting works from several painting series created in the recent years of his practice. What connects them is a non-obvious tension between nature—understood as a broad, ambiguous, and elusive phenomenon—and the human being as a thinking, observing, and analyzing subject, who is at the same time an integral part of the world.
The exhibited paintings—landscapes, portraits, and still lifes—reveal spaces where the natural and the fabricated, the real and the artificial, interpenetrate. Łukasz Stokłosa questions clear-cut divisions, showing that they have long lost their relevance—if they ever had any practical validity at all. He replaces them with a fluid, hybrid reality of coexistence, in which boundaries are blurred and the visible becomes a projection and a construct.
False Views is a story about the illusions we create in order to domesticate the world. A story about images of nature designed by humans—for humans—and about the belief that what we see is subject to our control. The exhibition invites us to immerse ourselves in a reality where boundaries dissolve and the familiar begins to provoke uncertainty. It is an exhibition about looking—and about how often what we see tells us more about ourselves than about the world we attempt to describe.
Łukasz Stokłosa draws on the cultural imaginarium, selecting motifs that interest him and introducing them into his works, assigning them new meanings—not by placing them in different contexts, but by stripping them of their previous ones. Nature in his paintings is not a backdrop, but an active participant in this play. It is shaped, stylized, and tamed, yet at the same time it eludes order and logic. This is a dark, ambivalent world, devoid of any promise of harmony. With his works, Łukasz Stokłosa does not document reality; he designs visions. We remember these images, even though we have never experienced them. “Art is thought from the future,” writes Timothy Morton in Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence. “If we want thought different from the present, then thought must veer toward art.”
A monographic album bearing the same title as the exhibition will be published. It is not an exhibition catalogue, but an autonomous publication devoted to the artist’s work. It will include texts contextualizing Łukasz Stokłosa’s art from a cultural perspective, written by Delfina Jałowik, Xavier F. Salomon, Jarosław Trybuś, and Katarzyna Wąs.
