Jarek Piotrowski‘s Soft Machine is a multi-faceted exhibition that combines cut out PVC works, paintings, drawings, sound, digital imagery and performance. The Polish born artist has constructed an aesthetic language of provocative yet playful anarchy, gleaning figurative and abstract motifs from medical, religious and natural process books. For this exhibition Piotrowski borrows his title from William Burroughs‘ 1961 novel of the same name, composed using the “Cut-Up” process of deconstructing and rearranging a linear piece of writing to create a new text. Like Burroughs, Piotrowski creates a subjective world that is more than the sum of its parts.
The most immediately dominant visual aspect of Soft Machine is a series of works Piotrowski created by painstakingly cutting and removing pieces from PVC sheets. The artist’s cuts transform a banal industrial material into large hanging artworks that are rich with imagery; the negative space cut from the sheets reveal glimpses of intangible narratives from an imagined world. Figures and skeletal parts surrounded by fragments of organic and geometric patterns dwell here; two boys pray back to back, one man holds another at gunpoint, a group sings in unison. The symmetry of these tapestry-like works brings to mind carpet pages from Eastern and Western religious texts, while their arrangement seems to invite ritualistic behaviour. Hanging just shy of the gallery walls and in a central space that echoes the atrium above, the works cast shadows around them, creating a viewing experience that is at once calming and unsettling.
A significant aspect of this immersive show is a hypnotic sound installation with digitally projected imagery. Contained within a custom built curtained stage, Piotrowski produced the work in collaboration with German electro-acoustic composer Lars Korb and Japanese sound designer Ayumi Sawa. Using unconventional and handmade “sound objects” to create an evolving atmosphere that can transform from dystopic to serene, the trio will perform live on the opening night from behind a veil. Many of the accompanying visual elements echo Piotrowski’s cut out works, while other details complement them: a selection of bones assemble, scatter and rearrange themselves as an imagined creature; drips of black paint race across a white surface during a dramatic crescendo; figurative fragments are mirrored to create bilaterally symmetrical abstractions, suggestive of ink blots used in psychoanalytic therapy. The performance on 20th January, along with live jamming sessions held over the weekend, will be recorded and edited to create the sound that will accompany the installation for the remainder of the exhibition.
Sharing something with the uncanny humour of the Dadaists, the free association and inner traumas explored by the Surrealists, and the corporeal impact of the works of the Beat Generation, Piotrowski’s carefully crafted Soft Machine rouses the senses and ignites the mind.
For more information on the opening performance see:
http://www.galerie8.co.uk/cat/events/events/soft-machine-opening-performance/
Jarek Piotrowski was born in Bialystok, Poland in 1973 and currently lives and works in Munich. Recent exhibitions include BRP Paper, Black Rat Press, London, 2011, Bimbo Box 5, Munich, 2011, Alice Dans les Tenebres, Galerie Popy Arvani, Paris, 2010 and Lehner/Piotrowski, Galerie Andreas Höhne, Munich, 2010.
Lars Korb is a Munich based electronic musician focusing on sound design and multimedia projects. His work includes film and documentary soundtracks, such as 2004’s The Corporation, and a collaboration with highly acclaimed Japanese turntablist DJ Krush on the soundtrack for First Squad. He has also performed at music festivals with the electropop band Minikamoo.
Ayumi Sawa is a Japanese musician and sound designer. Her musical practice often focuses on the layering motion picture, dialogue, and image with analogue and digital sound production techniques to create a symbiotic tapestry of picture and sound. Sawa participated in one half of experimental, Tokyo based electronica duo CONFEDERADOS.
