Radek Szlaga — The Heart — Laure Roynette Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: April 16 → May 23, 2015

Carte Blanche to Sandra Mulliez

Sandra Mulliez created SAM Art Project in 2009, a sponsorship program for contemporary art, to promot the work of foreign artists in France, and French artists abroad, through the yearly attribution of a prize and a residency program.

Sandra Mulliez and Laure Roynette Gallery invite Radek Szlaga and present his soloshow, “The Heart”.

Radek Szlaga is a teller of the stories of the post generation.

Modernism, rock, structuralism, colonialism — everything that could fall, fell, and passed not without consequences. The artist became a witness of irrevocable changes and an author of the tales of a new generation that emerged on the ruins of old separations and identities. Divided between an anthropological need for mythical and founding narrations and the disruptive forces of contemporary visuality, Szlaga developed a hyper-textual language that continues to intrigue and question the relationship between the traditional medium of painting and the more recent possibilities of a digitally and technologically wide-world. On the one hand, his painting practice is embedded in the contemporary networks of the distribution of the visible; on the other, it pursues a controversial politics of apportionment of its own. Szlaga establishes what could be called a planned economy of the redistribution of the over-visible and the under-visible.

Radek Szlaga, Anus Mundi, 2014 Oil on canvas © Radek Szlaga & Galerie Laure Roynette, Paris

He reverses the attractiveness order of our times, adding a unique flair to what is considered inferior and unworthy of attention.

He builds complex poetic constellations of human and animal figures, motifs, signs, landscapes, situations and events, sentences and symbols. Szlaga’s protagonists are in constant flux, migration, reconstructing and reconfiguring the semiotic field.

Radek’s latest works are inspired by several appropriations from Joseph Conrad’s book Heart of Darkness (1899) such as Christopher Wool’s painting, Sven Lindqvist novel “Exterminate all the Brutes” and obviously by the movie of FF Coppola “Apocalypse Now” (1979).

Radek Szlaga is a spontaneous and complete painter, fully devoted to what he does. His impressive practice daringly demonstrates what painting can be today, what it has always been, and what it has never been.