El Rancho Dolores Painting

The American paintings by Piotr Szczur are not only memorabilia. Only when suspended in one row do they begin to function as a kind of map, a testimony of the journey traveled – both in the physical and the spiritual senses. And although all the artworks from this series differ from each other just as the individual states of America do, the “Made in USA” series constitutes an extremely coherent whole. In Piotr Szczur’s paintings we find consistent admiration for the majesty of the American sky, a sense of unrestricted freedom, sensitivity with which the artist experiences and depicts the surrounding landscape, and, above all, a deep understanding and awareness of belonging to the place he still longs for. That is why, despite their small sizes, the canvases from the "Made in USA" series contain such intriguing interpretive ambiguity. Almost every one of them can function simultaneously as an autonomous landscape, a fixed testimony of the process of formal evolution of the artist's work, a very subjective representation of the remembered place, but also a sign, a symbol of the United States as a whole. - Marcin Krajewski