Artist: Tomasz Kręcicki
Exhibition title: Giallo
Venue: Stereo, Warsaw, Poland
Date: September 29 – November 5, 2022
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Stereo
Stereo is pleased to invite you to Tomasz Kręcicki’s solo exhibition, entitled „Giallo”.
The concept of the exhibition we are presenting as part of this year’s Warsaw Gallery Weekend is related to the artist’s cinematic fascinations and the development of selected motifs in his work. The titular giallo is the term for a film genre popular in 1960s Italy. Inspired by popular literature, crime fiction and horror, it developed distinctive features not only on a plot level, but also on an aesthetic level. Giallo films are characterised by marked thematic and stylistic tropes: vivid colours, extravagant framing, close-ups of faces, eyes as well as objects.
In his paintings, Kręcicki often refers to cinematic framing techniques, but also adopts cinematic solutions, for example, in the lighting of the frame. His works repeat, for example, the fundamentally expressionistic situation of a shape (body or object) emerging from darkness. This type of treatment is used by the artist as a setting for mundane representations taken from everyday life, which are literally shown in a ‚different light’. This allows Kręcicki to derive maximum meaning from visual trifles: grains scattered in a pan bring to mind the starry sky, popcorn resembles a meteor shower.
The current exhibition also highlights another important feature of the artist’s work. The intriguing scenes, which rarely contain the entire representation, but often only a fragment of an object or a part of the body, suggest to us not only the presence of an observer and a world outside the frame, but are organised in such a way that only the viewer of the painting completes the whole situation. Kręcicki leaves space for the viewer, his or her gaze, discreetly manipulating their point of view. The noticeable absence in the artist’s works – the absence of the human figure – is symptomatic of their situational nature: the last slice of pizza in an open, greasy box evokes the social event around it and allows the audience to guess and experience the emotions associated with it.
