There Is No Such Thing

Mateusz Sadowski focuses on elements that our mind often follows inattentively, without bothering to take an effort to remember and inscribe them within the framework of wider experience. This kind of perception brings to mind a child’s way of perceiving the world: staring at particles of being or following with one’s faze a crack one notices, a cobweb or a hole in a wall. The reference to “epiphanies” is far from sentimentality or exaltation, definitely ironic and self-conscious. Confronted with his art we observe inconspicuous actions and activities taken in the margin of existence for some unclear purpose. The artist follows his personal paths of associations and tries to fully “disambiguate” them, meticulously penetrating selected fragments of reality. We are told up-front that the author’s head is incessantly grappling with boredom as with an element. Sadowski defines the world in its torpor and monotony but in spite of this he affirms life, or the parts of which it is composed.

In Sadowski’s hands the banality of life has been transformed into a dynamic system; his “machines” are not only kinetic and audial but comprise also the way of thinking about video. Mateusz’s newest films have a rhythmic structure whose successive elements/scenes/episodes naturally follow from the preceding ones not only because of the logic of narration but also due to the editing, which reflects the mechanism of memory operation.

We cannot lose sight of the sense of humour which this time seems to come to the fore. The artist seems to be regarding from a substantial distance his own struggle with the matter of the world, assuming both the role of the subject of rational actions and the object of observation and analyses.