„Smells Like Teen Spirit”

Nocny Art Patrol Gallery invite you on September 27 at 7pm for the opening of Dawid Czycz’s solo exhibition „Smells Like Teen Spirit”.

Dawid Czycz – Smells Like Teen Spirit

They wanted to entertain us.

It all came to us like signals from a distant galaxy. Beautiful, wrapped in shiny cellophane. It fascinated, moved and frightened us. We did not yet know exactly the sender of these signals, only their content.

There were cheerleaders from schools we didn’t go to and lifeguards from the beach by the ocean we didn’t even get our feet wet in. The astonishing story of a missing girl from a small foreign town whose next episode we waited impatiently for all week and the war renegade who was still in a distant war. These were not our stories. But that didn’t matter.

We lived a carefree life, it seemed to us at the time, without any purpose. Little did we know that this purposelessness would later turn out to be the time of our tale. Today we know that.

We didn’t know that the niche would become mainstream, and that the once chic fashion house would be selling for huge sums of money deliberately aged trainers, trampled as if after a grunge concert. Back then, what mattered was being together, music about the meaninglessness of life and running across rooftops. And those frames under the eyelids from distant, fascinating stories.

Today these frames seem a little less sharp, though still ubiquitous. They are time-worn and covered in banana spots. That doesn’t mean, however, that the loving gaze of the Titanic lovers is any less keen. We look at them with nostalgia. Bananas, after all, are at their sweetest moments before they go bad.

At the exhibition “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, Dawid Czycz will present oil paintings that are part of the so-called ‘banana series’, which speaks of the passage of time and the inevitability of transience. It is a personal retrospective of the artist, in which he returns to his teenage years and the symbolic frames from mass culture associated with that time. The temporal perspective allows for nostalgia and a closer look at them as mental calques, both personal and generational. Reminiscences and dreams evoked from the artist’s childhood and youth are ultimately subjected to painterly deconstruction as myths of our pop culture.

— Agnieszka Gołębiewska and Mariusz Horanin

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