[Kunsthalle Zürich disclaimer: Alina Schwarz is writing about a show at Kunsthalle Zürich]
Entering the Kunsthalle Zürich exhibition entitled Dzisiaj, (Today), one feels drawn to look into the small but masterfully crafted oil paintings, a special kind of poetic melancholia. The artist Karol Palczak is able to do something which is increasingly harder in the contemporary art world, namely, to set a kind of mood through his art. These paintings evoke Nordic white and grey skies, a winter atmosphere and cold, inanimate entities. It is a specific feeling one gets that recalls contemplative long walks where time feels suspended. Sunday afternoons spent wandering through never-ending lowlands, immersed in a dark green and grey mist.
Yet, Palczak’s views are far from lifeless. Men – mostly portrayed working or in working environments – appear here and there through the misty landscapes in the artist’s village. The artist’s first institutional solo show is straightforward. It is simple, bare, like his work. Oil on metal on wood, mostly small or mid-sized. There is nothing sensational, nothing provocative, nothing extreme about them. Their unpretentiousness catches the eye, leading the observer to linger on the very well-painted details.
The walls are sparingly hung with paintings, leaving space for absorption and pause. The rhythm between empty space and paintings leans slightly towards the former. In fact, it gestures towards the minimalist style of white cube exhibitions, where the art objects are isolated in a neutral space. The artist’s preoccupation towards the local, the surroundings of his hometown and time’s passing appear to be the key themes of the show; the arrangement of the works does not point to that convincingly.
Nonetheless, it is surprising how, even today, this kind of realism in painting is still poignant. Their straightforward eloquence may be proof that painting’s material qualities can still impress the eye. The photographic and video material which the artist himself collected give his paintings a peculiar sense of intimate accuracy as well as timelessness. The colours are carefully mixed with sun-exposed oils. Among the works, the largest canvases, depicting a burning willow tree on the banks of the River San, catch the viewer’s attention for their cold palette and the very specific material quality of the smoke, which is depicted as an entity of its own, with a specific density. The fire falls onto the painting surface, small bits of it progressively devour the blackened tree with an impressive glow.
Karol Palczak, Dzisiaj, Kunsthalle Zürich, 2025
Image: Cedric Mussano
The artist is inspired by the ancient propitiatory rites for a fertile spring – rituals common to many rural European regions – and folk traditions, which all inform the very specific sense of place and situatedness present in his work. This is the artist’s hometown in the Southcarpatian area of Poland, where a specific merging of Catholic, Jewish and Eastern Orthodox traditions once present has been increasingly erased, and now the military and weapon industry predominate. ‘Today’ is a reflection on time, starting with the artist’s engagement with the slow but relentless time of the land and its inhabitants, and the possibility of land to retain, materially or through its atmosphere, the accretions of history which are so often wiped out from modernity.
The paintings strive to be realistic, honest and bare, yet they also evoke a sense of mythical return to an origin, be it of birthplace, land or tradition. A viewer may be reminded of Rembrandt’s use of light and his nordic ambiances; a comparison to Titian’s depiction of fire in his later works, such as The Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence from 1548, also seems relevant. Fire here becomes symbolic: it points to the friction between the passing of time and the land’s transformation. It welcomes change, turning wood into potentially fertile ashes. Simultaneously, through the medium of photography, the paintings suggest suspension and melancholia. He seems to ask: do we have to welcome the passing of time as a transformation or should we linger in what history leaves behind? Memory is a key term here, and photography can be a tool to memory. Reflections on photography and memory may remind you of paintings by Gerhard Richter, where the blurriness of memory is physically displayed. But this kind of painting is something else, it inscribes memory with a life of its own, stretching the past and present together. In doing so, it tries to mirror a type of temporality composed of scars of what has been. But this past seems to be opaque, perhaps hidden behind a veil of smoke.
The show leaves the viewer with the traces of a long-gone mythical past and a sense of a present unable to forget. It materially suggests that the craft of painting is still unique in being able to bear a specific accretion of temporal layers. The works convey the opacity of a landscape, one that ought to be observed with careful and patient interest rather than a voyeuristic glimpse.
Karol Palczak, Djisiaj, 27 September 2025–18 January 2026, Kunsthalle Zürich