Retina and Parquetry
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retina «latin for the area at the back of the eye; a network of cells converting light into an image»
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parquetry «french: parquetage; the seamless covering of a plane with a pattern of shapes that fit togetherwithout gaps or overlaps»
The two concepts juxtaposed in the exhibition title – one drawn from the language of anatomy, the other from geometry – indicate a point of contact between biological structure and geometric order, where the boundary between the organic and the calculated becomes indistinct. Piotr Bosacki designs precise systems and observes the moment of their controlled disintegration, when unforeseen complexity emerges from the “germ” of simple rules. His work seeks to grasp the dual nature of a world that simply exists, before we have time to invent it, yet simultaneously appears as if it had been deliberately designed.
The exhibition occupies a single room but unfolds between two poles connected by a shared concern with notation. On the one hand, there is a moving image and voice: the animated film Retina in Vitro, in which the artist reads a poem, interweaving his monologue with animation. On the other, a series of images produced through the method of serial parquetry. The film’s structure recalls an ancient Talmudic model: a central narrative core surrounded by commentaries, which Bosacki likens to the verbal salad of a schizophrenic mind. The main core follows a relatively coherent, cause-and-effect logic, yet remains fragmentary. The surrounding blocks, more associative and intuitive, attempt to patch the gaps in the narrative, forming a kind of crossword or investigative puzzle. The film’s title alludes to Adam Mickiewicz’s Romanticism, and, as in the poet’s work, the tension between order and chaos remains unresolved. For Bosacki, this is not so much a flaw as a precondition of visionary art – a threshold where precision gives way to something unforeseen.
Next to the screen, on the metal build plate of a 3D printer, a single frame is frozen, printed from plastic filament whose strands resemble hair or grass. What appears only momentarily in the film here reveals its material texture and randomness. Although the vector drawing guiding the process is precise, the artist intentionally allows it to slip out of control, introducing contingency and organic variation into the mechanical process. The retina functions in a similar way – Bosacki describes it as a corporeal vessel that, by virtue of its shape, absorbs light before conscious perception takes hold. The film thus becomes an effort to decelerate this process, to peer into the realm where the eye works faster than thought.
At the opposite pole lies painting: White Paintings from the 10/5 series and Spillovers, created using the method of serial parquetry. This technique, developed by Bosacki, draws on Roger Penrose’s geometry and the principles of serial music. A short algorithm – a table of module dimensions and their rotations, akin to a transformation matrix in a dodecaphonic sequence – generates internally coherent, organic forms in which symmetry is deliberately disrupted. This effect is achieved through a phase-shifting technique – the systematic “lagging” of one parameter relative to another. It is precisely this subtle yet consistent deviation from strict mathematical order that lends the geometric patterns a character associated with living forms – plants, animals, even human faces – manifesting an imperfect symmetry in which we recognise something alive.
Both poles converge on the question of permanence: How can a biological or cultural structure, once recorded, outlast its origin? Bosacki identifies here the operation of homeostasis, which governs both the body and culture: skin cells die so that the skin may endure as a whole; organisms reproduce so that the species persists. For him, letters, musical notation and algorithms become further instruments of the same principle – means by which the human mind extends its grasp of order beyond the limits of the body. While a human life may span a century, words inscribed in clay can endure for millennia: “the arrangement of notes is more enduring than bodies.” Bosacki refers to this as a unistic construction – a complex form emerging from a short initial sequence, unity articulated through multiplicity. White Paintings and Overflows exemplify this phenomenon: the result resembles nature rather than mathematics. The exhibition is an attempt to capture this balance in a world where rational systems are continually exposed to controlled breakdowns and where notation – a technical, yet not entirely humourless record of reality – is the only stable point of reference. As we hear in the film: “Frequency and geometry. There is nothing more. Release the blades of grass. Amen and Pilate.”
- Curator
- Sara Szostak
