Virtual exhibition · Online, 2026
A reason to stop
Most art today is looked at on a phone, somewhere between one scroll and the next. We are fine with that, we look the same way. This exhibition asks for one thing only: three paintings, a few minutes each. That is enough to see more than you expect.
I have sat through more than a few arguments about who the most technically gifted painter in Poland is, and I cannot recall a single one where Cyryl's name did not come up. He painted this during a residency at The Fores Project in London, which leaves one small problem: getting it safely back to Poland. A canvas this size needs a crate so big and so heavy that one of the couriers who had to deliver it still has not forgiven me. I regret nothing all the same.
The eye keeps reading even as the page turns. I know that feeling: with some books you refuse to lose even a second.
Woś lays down thinned oil and then washes part of it away, so figures and objects surface very slowly out of the traces left behind, and I am never quite sure of any of them. The range of sources she draws on is hard to even imagine: Renaissance painting, Christian myth, French realism, New German cinema and amateur pornography. That is the kind of company that can meet on a single canvas.
Up close you can see how little it takes to make a body: a few traces of washed-away paint. Whoever is looking fills in the rest.
Figures surface out of the traces very slowly, and I am never quite sure of any of them.
I keep a private ranking of cat activities in Waliszewska's paintings. Third place, cats taking part in rituals. Second, cats taking part in battles. First, and by some distance, cats smoking cigarettes. It is a dark world, folkloric and dreamlike, with death never far off. Six hundred years ago Piero della Francesca painted figures like statues, both male and female at once, and said everything he wanted with light, shadow and colour alone. Waliszewska can do that too.
Deep inside the funnel a cat sits smoking a cigarette. In my private ranking of feline activities in Waliszewska's paintings, this is the undisputed first place.
If you made it this far, you stopped. That is the whole idea. The guest book is below.
Guest book
Leave a trace. Tell us what stopped you here.