photograph, black and white photograph, 80 x 84 cm
work donated to Galeria Arsena? by the artist


Zbigniew Rogalski uses his camera not so much to record reality, but to reflect on the subject of painting. For many years now he has been challenging the stereotype of painting as an exhausted medium. He unmasks the fallacy of realism as a faithful imitation of reality. He analyses the painterly workshop and carefully investigates the relationship between the artist’s gaze and its materialisation; between what the painter sees and what he records on the surface of the canvas. Rogalski’s uncompromising approach forces him to record all the flaws in the perception process, its side effects, such as shadows, reflections or blurred contours. The questions of seeing, realism and illusion are a common factor of his explorations in the field of painting and those in the area of photography.