Leak | Przeciek
Exile Berlin, DE
© Mateusz Sadowski
2012
photo: C. Siekmeier
Mateusz Sadowski’s works are deliberately hard to pin down. Instead, and by clear artistic intention, they operate via their ambiguity. He avoids literal statements in favor of subtle messages.
His works appear as crossroads that allow for many points of view and approaches from multiple directions, evoking diverse questions while avoiding direct answers: ” I think about my works as carefully thought-out psychological tools with an yet undefined use.”
Roaming around a hyper-complex world his artistic practice is often triggered by a sense of boredom and aimlessness. As a result, he isolates minute and random details as the source for his works.
In his film Onetime a monitor becomes the main set and purpose of the film itself. The monitor, now the lone actor in its own film, becomes a sad though funny metaphor reminiscent of early Harold Lloyd or Chaplin films; seemingly making a laconic statement of our obsessive appetite for technological progress.
In his work It ends an almost pictorial image of a forest becomes the elevated artwork embedded in a frame of cheap grey carpet that does the opposite of its purpose by functioning not as a cozy invitation but as a border between viewer and image.
In his new first animation film that gave the exhibition its title, Sadowski constructs pieces of trash found around in his studio and animates them to living creatures roaming and transforming around on a carpeted stage.
In Sadowski’s works we observe inconspicuous actions and activities isolated from the very margin of existence towards some unclear purpose. The artist follows his personal path of associations and meticulously re-arranges selected fragments to his own newly constructed reality.
From Sadowski’s point of view a conceived banality of life is transformed into a dynamic system that isn’t in itself a destructive message but rather an inspiring and humoristic one.
Christian Siekmeier