You are here

Jarek Puczel | Face Value

Type:

City:

Categories:

Exhibition Type:

How many artists: 
1

How many exhibition works:

Date: 
Thursday, 29 September 2022 to Sunday, 23 October 2022

Pontone Gallery is proud to introduce Polish painter, Jarek Puczel. With a background in film and design, he found his vocation in painting and for the last fifteen years has worked prolifically, showing at many international art fairs and galleries. This is his first solo exhibition in the UK.

Puczel’s subject is the figure, particularly the head. His compositions typically feature a couple, male and female, engaged in an intimate embrace. A romantic and idealised moment is rendered in a coolly dispassionate style. His technique is graphic and crisp; the colour and tone flat, the draughtsmanship precise. The models are sparingly described: contours are missing, which allows the background to bleed through. The subjects float over the picture plane, as if at risk of disintegration. At odds with the implied emotive content, the technique sets up a tension, a critical distance from the act depicted.

The female figure takes precedence. She has identifiable characteristics, features that denote a specific personality. In contrast, the male protagonist is an anonymous, barely differentiated cypher. There are some paintings of the woman alone, painted in a heightened colour palette, lit up against a landscape, which hint at portraiture and at an animated and dominant player in the game.

As the artist’s method owes a debt to the world of design, so the compositions, in their cropping and editing, owe something to film. These are images of focussed drama, like stills clipped from a continuum. They are elements of a story, which, although familiar, we are not entirely privy to. Mysterious in their content, we are invited to fill in an interpretation from the clues. Are these pictures of tenderness, alienation or something cynically performative? The coolness of delivery leaves it up to the viewer to decide whether to take the picture at face value or not.

Curator :

Artist:

Telephone: 
02077308777
Venue ( Address ): 

74 Newman St,

London,

W1T 3DB

Pontone Gallery , London

Other events from Pontone Gallery

view
Tim Wright: Featured Works | Cast
11/18/2023 to 12/23/2023
view
Chris Rivers: Featured Works | Expendable Youth
11/18/2023 to 12/23/2023
view
Timothy Spall | Winter Sun
11/18/2023 to 02/03/2024
view
Angela Glajcar | Vital Materiality
10/13/2023 to 11/12/2023

Pages

Related Shows This Week in UK

view
Art and Books Charity Sale at Ben Uri
03/15/2024 to 03/31/2024
view
Choir
02/02/2024 to 03/30/2024
view
Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2024
02/23/2024 to 06/02/2024
view
Capturing the Climate – Mixed Media Workshop
03/29/2024 to 04/07/2024
view
Matt Connors: Finding Aid
03/08/2024 to 06/02/2024
view
HOMAGE TO QUAN AM BY MARIA THAN
03/28/2024 to 05/19/2024
view
transfeminisms
03/08/2024 to 04/20/2024
view
THE HUDSONS, Family Ties
01/31/2024 to 04/14/2024

Pages