With Deepest Sympathy - Wallspace Gallery, Cliché Gallery by Igor Dobrowolski 19.10.2024 - 16.11.2024Curator: Karolina Kliszewska

Igor Dobrowolski’s Aesthetic Paintings

(...) In Dobrowolski’s paintings, expressive abstraction and violent figuration in the spirit of art brut meet and co-exist, affected by decisive, suggestive painterly gestures. The expressive means are employed to authenticate and convey how individual human lives, bodies, and psyches are being violated. The demon of non-co-existence draws the lines of divide and painfully marks the skin of the wounded life.

It is as if the human universe was disintegrating before our eyes. We are confronted with a complex visuality highly charged with truth conveyed through painterly means. The aesthetic and ethical aspects of the artist’s vision correspond. In the context of Igor Dobrowolski’s paintings, using Wolfgang Welsch’s neologism “aesth/ethic” seems justified for at least two reasons: it emphasizes the artist’s moral sensitivity enclosed in and conveyed through aesthetic and expressive visual form, and it illuminates his ability – rather rare in contemporary art – to have developed an artistic painterly language to address the painful, almost unimaginable, truth of human existence.

Realized in successive visual embodiments, the artist’s ethically-informed approach has produced a vision of the world infused with a moral sense. The violated life penetrates into the expressive painterly matter. If art is capable of capturing the religious spirit of the time, in this case it is dealing with nihilism embodied and visualized. No ethically-minded art can disregard this challenge. Quite the contrary, it faces it and identifies, and then counteracts using its expressive means. Consequently, it sensitizes those who are less mindful, more casual or simply indifferent.

I do not want to relate the artist’s biography: it is still in the making and besides, his paintings are eloquent enough, and – like Dobrowolski himself – resolute and determined. They strive – successfully – to visually express something of greatest importance: the suffering of a fellow human being. They seem to implore: “you have to change your life.”

– Zbigniew Jan Mańkowski