DARK PEOPLE Painting

"The saxophone [...] in the hands of musicians such as Hawkins, Parker or Coltrane has become a tool for setting new directions in jazz. Is it also in art in general? Judging from what we see in Rafał Chojnowski's paintings, this question is Answer yes. Keep swinging! " [quotation: Krzysztof Rudowski] Rafał Chojnowski (born 1966). Painter and designer. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Wrocław (currently Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Fine Arts) at the Faculty of Painting, in the studio of prof. Andrzej Klimczak Dobrzaniecki and prof. Konrad Jarodzki. He studied graphic art at the Camden School of Art in London. He lives and works in Wrocław. His works are, among others in collections: USA, England, Austria, Poland and Portugal. He has participated in many exhibitions, both individual and collective, in Poland and abroad, incl. in London (Eva Jekel Gallery, 1991), in Wrocław (SURVIVAL 3 and Galeria na Solnym, 2005), in Warsaw (SohoFactory, 2013) and recently in Wrocław (Eklektik Art, 2021) A very active, diverse and expressive artist. He creates a world subject to a specific artistic interpretation. The works reflect the mood of the moment, but do not relate to a specific situation. The means he uses are supposed to emphasize the purely painterly qualities of the paintings. A person, an object, or an event are only an excuse. His works oscillate between figurative and abstract painting - the artist makes the depicted scenes unreal. Striking is the spontaneity and magic of his canvases, painted with impetus, full of expression, energetic brush strokes. The saxophonist initiated a series in which the search for combinations of colors and shapes is similar to jazz improvisations. Tone, rhythm, counterpoint - he sees this type of dependence between the elements of the composition, their internal relations, dependencies and painterly logic. For him, collages were a kind of imagination exercises, and as a result, they became an inspiration for new images built on the basis of improvisation, each element begins to harmonize with the other added. These works are an attempt to transform one technique into another. While painting, he experiments and checks to what extent he can use the reality processed in collage.