On Friday, December 13 at 18:00 the last vernissage of the year took place. This time it was a presentation of the latest works by Mateusz Piestrak entitled. “Traces - Shapes - Signs.”

The exhibition consisted of more than 20 paintings - with the exception of one - dating back to 2024.

The presented works can be divided into three main groups. The first of these - the most “abstract” - are works created by capturing the shapes of random objects. Captured in a non-obvious convention, they begin to bring to mind distant associations or reveal hidden symbolism. An unfolded cardboard box transforms into a castle or fortress, a binder emerges from a crumpled tablecloth like a predatory shark, and scattered nails bring to mind an encrypted message. The act of decontextualization plays a key role in these works - familiar objects lose their utilitarian function and gain new, ambiguous identities. The artist seems to be asking: how does reality change when we stop taking it for granted?

Another group explores motifs through their evolution and transformation. Compositions of abstract shapes are supplemented or juxtaposed with more recognizable forms in a way that balances the familiar and the unfamiliar. The outlines of vague situations, or rather “situational models,” are formed before our eyes. The contours of familiar objects are transformed into new, alien forms. This visual deformation can arouse various emotions in the viewer - from curiosity arising from observing the process of this strange transformation, to anxiety caused by contact with a theoretically familiar object that has unexpectedly become a mysterious sign.

The last group consists of the most realistic paintings. Synthetic spots and lines are now arranged in recognizable motifs, often fantastic or impersonating surrealist clichés. Elements of a new, fictionalized reality emerge from the artist's imagination, which we look at closely, like figures and strange trinkets spread out on a board. But here, too, simplicity is illusory - the paintings introduce the viewer to a world in which banal objects become carriers of ambiguous associations.

The resulting reality - Mateusz Piestrak's land of imagination is a kind of shadow theater taking place before the viewers' eyes, to which one of the paintings presented in the exhibition directly refers. Intertwined hands - perhaps belonging to the artist himself - placed in front of a light source cut out a bird-like shape in its fullness. Piestrak uses shadow not only as a metaphor - fleeting and changeable - but as a tool that allows him to cross the boundaries between the material and the imagined. The shadow in his paintings is not just a reflection of reality, but its reinterpretation - something like a visual trace.