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Bartosz Kokosiński refers playfully and ironically to different genres of painting such as still life, assemblage, landscape painting, Arte povera or Minimal Art and transforms them in seemingly autonomous objects by bent stretchers and burst canvases.

In his series Paintings devouring Reality the canvases devour their environment. Kokosiński muffles different situations, surroundings or conditions with the canvas, but still allows reality to push through. The panel acts protective, euphemistic and stifling at once.

In Painting devouring my studio Kokosiński used working materials and useless items of his studio. It functions like a portrait of his working area and profession and let us think about the conditions of making art or the status of the artist. „Painting devouring a rural landscape“ shows a beforehand idyllic rural scene now squeezed and disrupted in the canvas.

The imaginable ideal of a beautiful landscape with nice one-family-houses has been overtaken by something. The dream of a good or better life has been smothered by a superior, invisible power. A metaphor for the numerous excesses of our globalized economies which enter our private sphere unasked.

In his „devouring series“ Kokosiński represents processes and objects from everyday life, whereas in his abstract works he deals with the modalities of painting as such. One can say that in latter works, the uncontrollable, inner essence of painting appears. Similar to an organic process the works crack from the inside, arch into the space, show their different layers or produce chapped surfaces. They convolve, contract, burst.

Kokosiński addresses painting as a metamorphic process which questions the genesis and evolution of the medium critically and expands its boarders into the space. On several levels Kokosiński plays with our systematics and transforms those procedures in formally, aesthetically and contentwise matured three-dimensional objects.

Behind that approach one can find the frequently asked question about what painting is supposed to depict in a powerfully pictorial world that is driven by continuous visual input. Kokosińskis hybrid works between painting and object can be seen as one possible answer.