Newsvendor
Upon entering Piotr Kowalski’s exhibition Newsvendor, we find ourselves immersed in an environment shaped by objects resembling post-office or bank counters, newsagents’ kiosks and drinks vending machines. At the centre of the space is a kinetic installation reminiscent of a rollercoaster or lottery machine. In fact, it is a track for a ping-pong ball, but also a system that delivers a binary verdict every four minutes: rejected, positive result, competition decided, negative account balance. There is an element of fun here, as well as risk, but also the frustration that arises when confronting an infrastructure that allows no opposition.
The featured installations are the outcome of calculation, metal welding, plastic heat-sealing and concrete casting. In selecting colours for his objects, Kowalski adheres strictly to the primary colours of the RAL chart. His works often seem to realise the dreams of the Constructivists. Reworking the movement’s associations with applied art and its reflections on movement and technology, he creates geometric installations and sculptures. Faith in modernity is transformed into absurdity or irony. In this exhibition, the language of architectural forms is accompanied by the visual clatter of small objects, which animate and make the functional structures seem more familiar. These include table-tennis balls wrapped in plastic film and sticky notes bearing stencils in primary colours. One may feel tempted to use them for a to-do list, a plan for the coming week, or a bet on the outcome of an imaginary race. Yet the space ultimately conforms to none of these orders, while the sticky notes are closer to works of geometric abstraction. The boundary between functionality and aesthetics begins to blur.
The artist is interested in the mechanisms that organise everyday life but have gradually faded from view. Plastic boxes, LED displays and rubbish bins are so familiar that they have become almost transparent. Kowalski invites us to notice their clumsiness, outdated forms and naïve charm. Such anthropomorphisation says more about us than it does about the objects themselves. Faced with technology, it may in fact be we who are clumsy, outdated and naïve. Engineering skill and an interest in systems of information transmission are set against the poetic collecting of anachronistic objects: numbered hotel key rings, Casio watches and broken calculators. The artist keeps them locked in boxes in his studio on the top floor of a Warsaw block of flats. He selects them for their qualities or for the materials from which they are made, such as plastic St Joseph’s staffs that imitate wood. Objects from this latter category are dismantled and transformed into sculptures. Kowalski sees them as an inexpensive and readily available source of material. Although his works are often inspired by what he describes as the inventive vision of the 1990s and 2000s, his practice is driven by collecting rather than nostalgia.
What can we do at a newsagent’s? Today, we might stop by to play the lottery or buy cigarettes. In Newsvendor, neither is possible. Instead, the artist creates a timeless space in which he sensitively reveals the cracks in the functioning of objects from the past that once promised progress.
