The Red Moon Painting

Piotr Szczur represents actually existing fragments of the landscape, although one can see an increasingly clear departure from realism, especially when we isolate the individual paintings from the context of the entire collection. The artist reduces unnecessary elements of his vistas, closes huge spaces of America in innovative, non-obvious cadres, and builds a world depicted with the help of vivid, harsh colors. Taking inspiration from nature, he increasingly perceives it as a complex system of lines, shapes, and colorful patches. Piotr Szczur focuses on the form of the artwork, celebrates the medium, deliberately guides the brushstroke, and, at the same time, splashes color on selected fragments of the composition so as to allow the element of the controlled fortuity to come to life. Thus, describing America becomes for him a de facto starting point for extremely important and groundbreaking experiments and reflections on the form of the work, which, in an increasingly noticeable way, lead him to abstraction. It seems, however, that this is an instinctive process, though inevitable, and the artist himself surrenders to it, looking at his own evolving style from a certain distance. - Marcin Krajewski