Mark Rothko said “I’m not an abstractionist… I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions”.

In Maciej Fricze’s painting, emotions are the basis for his artworks. The artist usually starts the creation process on the spur of the moment. His creations reflect his mood in a particular instant and his emotions become the leitmotif in his entire artistic creation as well as the key to reading it. These feelings are not random. The artist often consciously induces himself into a kind of rhythm, or even a trance, by repetitively listening to selected pieces of music.

Maciej Fricze calls his paintings ‘inner landscapes’. Their creation is the effect of an internal, intimate journey of the artist who gives his feelings the possibility to appear through the canvas.

The painting ‘A tornado scattering confetti over a destroyed city’ gave the title to the exhibition. Presentation is full of energy but, at the same time, when looking at the canvas we have an impression that the element is controlled and the confetti from the title is being scattered over the city according to a designated route. The artist says that his creation process is about mastering the chaos which he first creates on canvas. His artworks are the continuous struggle with the element (emotions) and an attempt to systematize them. Individual parts of the compositions react and interact with each other. As the artist says ‘they stroke, bite, jump, swim, melt, squeeze, drip’. Nothing is incidental. Expression is combined with balanced geometric forms that introduce an equilibrium in the accumulation of motifs.

The artist looks for visual inspiration in the best – his masters are Adrian Ghenie, Francis Bacon, and Albert Oehlen. Probably he drew the most from the work of Oehlen, who constantly questions the methods and means of expression, oscillating between abstract and figurative art. Fricze, like Oehlen, uses rigid forms to organize and somehow tame his works. Simultaneously, in most of his paintings we can perceive a reference to a storm, or a tornado. A spectator is not aware whether this reference is just the beginning of the explosion or the final moment of the already mastered element.

This is the first individual exhibition of Maciej Fricze. It gives us a taste of the possibilities of this artist who, like the elements / emotions in his paintings, discovers his possibilities and clearly makes us understand that this is just the beginning.

Małgorzata Fricze