The Fountain of Life Painting by Dariusz Labuzek

Dariusz Labuzek’s primitive-style paintings are inherently figurative, yet their naive imagery is predominantly design orientated, has an illustrative quality that is founded on an abstract painterly aesthetic. This juxtaposition of abstraction and design is what makes his pictures so compelling, his figures created as vessels to be filled by textures, colors, and ideas, beautiful compositions that conspire to feed our desire for aesthetically beautiful objects. Feeding of a very sculptural sensibility – possibly informed by his training as an architect and filmmaker – Labuzek repeats the same motifs in his paintings, yet each picture is utterly different, his starting point the relationship between painterly concepts such as texture, color, line, and form; This play on ideas gives him space to explore how we see a painting, the depth and nuance of material as well as the potential it has to manipulate how we view the picture plane. Some of his figures look like a cut out or a collage, the rest more illustrative in nature. This freedom of expression, of looking to articulate the emotional and poetic quality of an image through painterly concepts, is a subject that has preoccupied many artists throughout the 20th century, some of whom have laid the foundation for Labuzek’s own creative journey, such as Pablo Picasso, Antonio Tapies, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Agusti Puig, Magdalena Abakanowicz, Artur Nacht-Samborski, Cy Twombly, Zdzisław Beksinski, Jacek Göttel, Richard Diebenkorn, Jackson Pollock as well as Zhou Brothers, Roger Ballen, and Gerhard Richter. Labuzek continues in the tradition of these great artists, as a painter who is in love with his medium, in the possibilities that lie in brush and paint, in the potential that an abstract world of strange humanoid figures can lead us into a world that lightens up our own imagination. Here’s what he has to say about his work: ​ He lets himself be carried away without resistance in the direction indicated by the hand of intuitive lines, color, and form. His stimulating expression of the environment brings each viewer into an effervescent, playful, and exciting world full of organic forms and shapes. Each piece might be a peculiar exploration of botanical, animal, and human shapes. ​ Somewhat the combination of illustrative and abstract styles gives his work a dreamy quality that transports the imagination into a whole other world that is waiting to be discovered.