Zbigniew Rogalski moves with great ease in the expressive realms of painting and photography, mixing them and taking advantage of both disciplines in order to tackle the rhetoric of representation that surrounds these mediums. Reflexes, afterimages, film stills, and photographs all overlap the so-called image of reality. These disjointed fragments come together seamlessly in Rogalski’s work.

He uses paint and canvas to render meanings and emotions that are typically as fleeting as a drawing on a steamed-up piece of glass. A number of his pieces allude to the classic genres of painting, such as portrait or landscape. However, by interweaving different clichés and conventions of representation, Rogalski is led to surprisingly essential painterly solutions which make the tradition of this medium interesting again.

Rogalski succeeds in restoring a visionary element in painting without great fanfare or didacticism; rather through subtle methods of suggestion and allusion. The surface of the painting becomes, for a short while, a screen on which the obsessions, fears, and revelations of our consciousness are being displayed. This is first and foremost the painting of imagination. It allows for a non-reflective consumption of the visual world, but continuously leads us to the final and elusive matters. Sometimes the work is beautiful, sometimes it is scary, but there are moments, as in the paintings from Rogalski’s Death of Partisan series, when these two emotions blend, allowing the viewer to become lost in the world’s majestic ambiguity.

In 2006, Rogalski collaborated with sculptor Michal Budny on Projection. Despite their inherent differences, what unites them is a love of surface, texture, spatial illusionism, and a penchant for blurring the lines between fact and fiction. For Projection, they constructed a representation of a video installation. Using cardboard, wood, paint, and some artificial lighting, Rogalski and Budny inverted the ephemerality and movement typically associated with video art into static, permanent objects.

- Lukasz Gorczyca and Michal Kaczynski