Amadeusz Pucek Nude in Mirror, Back Turned, 2025, edition of 50

“The girl I painted in the reflection is bathed in darkness more so than in light. Twilight fills half of our lives, so limiting ourselves to depicting the world solely in daylight would be an unbearable silence. Especially since modest light fosters intimacy, and often only in it, in the evening or at night, do we feel closest to who we are. Daytime is for others, while nights are for ourselves,” - Amadeusz Pucek.

Warsaw-based Amadeusz Pucek (b. 1986) paints the people, objects and landscapes that surround him. An open box of matches. A nude woman in a bathtub. The interior of a bus. A view of the Vistula river from a bridge. Vegetables on a cutting board, before they are turned into broth. In capturing these moments vividly, it is as if he is trying to make the bold assertion that reality does in fact exist. “The motifs recurring across my canvases are what I live in and what I look at. There’s nothing extraordinary about them,” he says. “I sometimes feel as though I don’t choose the motif at all. The motif chooses itself.” These ordinary subjects create a shared world and ground for conversation, allowing the viewer to weave in their own stories and associations and to “experience fleeting moments of resonance.” Pucek ascribes equal weight to observation as he does to recording. Escaping the contemporary culture of immediacy and superficiality, he observes his surroundings with mindfulness and makes notes and sketches, searching for a deeper essence in the seemingly mundane. His canvases are prepared in a traditional manner, using nails, bone glue, impasto and heavy paint without any solvent. In his oil paintings he applies visible gestures, with big stains of colour putting on layer after layer. Pucek believes beauty transcends aesthetic categories or even the visible. Instead, it is a universal experience linked to notions of closeness, uniqueness, and goodness. [Excerpt from an essay on Inherent Vices by Daniel Duray.]