Artist: Thom Trojanowski
Exhibition title: And now, the fabulous Bokrijk!
Venue: Stereo, Warsaw, Poland
Date: November 18, 2023 – January 5, 2024
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Stereo
Thom Trojanowski’s exhibition consists of a series of paintings based on observations of the annual life cycle of the Bokrijk forest – a nature reserve covering fifty acres of forests, thickets, swamps and nineteen lakes. Every day, the artist conducts local visits, records and recreates subsequent impressions from walks in the natural surroundings. If you pay enough attention, it is easy to feel someone’s presence. The eyes, trying to locate it, may encounter a flower, a bent branch, something blurry, buried in the mud, or simply their own reflection in the water.
Trojanowski searches for a visual representation of the relationship between people and nature. He speculates on their coexistence, covering ecosystems with his own, sensitive gaze. His paintings seem to be an area in which both perspectives, those of man and nature, overlap and create a genre of ambivalent, dynamic landscape.
Trojanowski’s painting uses irrational emotions relating to direct experience with the beauty of nature, often showing that it does not always manifest itself through harmony, proportion or symmetry. Taking into account its complex character, he adapts painting means to present specific impressions – with a soft and subtle gesture depicts the silence and stillness of water, and sometimes thickens the tissue of the painting to a texture, thus imitating tree bark or dried mud.
The title slogan of the exhibition draws the Bokrijk forest in a completely unfamiliar context – by referring to it directly and announcing it, it gives the forest a sort of star identity. Its existence, however, is not determined by being perceived, it does not need a mediator or a stage – in Trojanowski’s painting, nature appears overwhelmingly indifferent towards man. Sometimes it gives him warmth and shelter, and sometimes it gives him a flood.
