RAFAL TOPOLEWSKI
ARTISSIMA | New Entries | Booth Fuxia 2
1 – 3 November, 2024
OVAL Lingotto Fiere
via Giacomo Mattè Trucco, 70
Torino, Italy
Alice Amati is pleased to present a solo booth by Polish and Lisbon-based artist Rafal Topolewski in the New Entry section of Artissima. This will mark the artist’s first solo presentation in Italy and the gallery’s debut at Artissima.
The gallery’s booth at Artissima draws inspiration from the theme of the 2024 edition of the fair – The Era of Daydreaming. Rafal Topolewski's intimate, small-scale paintings seem to inhabit a realm of semi-consciousness, evocative of the elusive state one drifts into while daydreaming.
In the artist’s practice, personal memories and dreams merge together resulting in paintings which stem from the liminal mental state between sleeping and waking. As such, depictions of faces share a vacant expression, suggestive of a mind not wholly present, and objects are superimposed over one another, in an out-of-joint logic. The combination of awkwardly cropped fragments and the juxtaposition of contrasting symbolic elements reproduces something of the uncanny way things get mixed up in the hallucinatory quality of dreams. In this suggestible state, the artist’s work invites viewers to immerse themselves in an uncanny space where logic and reason give way to intuition and emotion. The frequent inclusion of the artist’s own portrait suggests Topolewski’s interest in interrogating his own psyche as he picks at the seams of our collective consciousness.
