Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, artist Paweł Orłowski, curator Emilia Orzechowska, together with Van Rij Gallery invite you to the opening of the exhibition This Is Not a Form.
The title of Paweł Orłowski’s exhibition This Is Not a Form directly references René Magritte’s famous 1929 work The Treachery of Images. Much like the Belgian surrealist, Orłowski challenges the automatism of perception and the habitual identification of an image with its meaning.
Magritte reminded viewers that representation is not the thing itself — the image of a pipe is not a pipe, but merely its depiction. Orłowski goes one step further: his objects are not even representations of a specific form. They are perceptual situations that compel the viewer to interpret.The viewer is confronted with objects that appear to be “something,” yet ultimately resist being named. Every attempt at recognition triggers further associations, only for them to quickly lose stability.
This experience becomes the central axis of the entire project, which concerns not only form itself, but above all the mechanisms of perception, the need for classification, and the constant compulsion to assign meaning.
The starting point of Orłowski’s latest cycle is a series of abstract, symmetrical inkblot forms inspired by the tests of Hermann Rorschach — a projective method developed in the early twentieth century based on the interpretation of ambiguous images. In the classical test, the blot possesses no fixed meaning, and yet it almost automatically triggers the viewer’s urge to recognize a face, an animal, a figure, or a narrative. It is not the image that “represents” something; rather, the mind itself produces meaning.
Emilia Orzechowska
