IAN WIECZ0REK - Visual Artist

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Ian Wieczorek is a visual artist living in Co. Mayo, Ireland. His practice is based primarily in painting and drawing, and more recently curation. Since 2003 he has exhibited widely in group and selected shows in Ireland, Northern Ireland, Germany and China. His 6th solo exhibition took place in the Linenhall Arts Centre in Castlebar, Co. Mayo in September 2011.

His recent work explores the implications of contemporary visual vernacular, and how digital currency and context are becoming increasingly important in locating cultural identity. The rendering of found low resolution digital images in the 'traditional' medium of oil on canvas also sets up an implicit tension that invites their reappraisal as objects of aesthetic consideration in their own right.

"Wieczorek’s paintings represent images that are part of (the) currency of our everyday life, grabbed from the internet, the endless badly reproduced imagery of the virtual world. The paintings reflect the separation of appearance from its ‘truth’. In this way, the gap between the lushness of Wieczorek’s paintings and the brutality of what superficially seems to be their content reflect this sense of their being very much ‘of the world’.
One feature of this series of paintings is their very painterliness, the blurring of the image. However, this blurring represents a deliberate and painstaking representation of the original poor quality ‘shorthand’ digital image.
These paintings (...) combine autographic immanence with an aesthetic function far removed from the original intention behind the making of the images, thus creating a new work of art from them. The focus then comes on the picture itself, not the image, enabling us to think about the politics of the fragmenting Spectacle – perhaps the only rational procedure left for thinking about painting in the contemporary world."

- Dr. John Mulloy
Lecturer in Art History and Critical Theory,
Galway Mayo Institute of Technology
Extract from exhibition catalogue essay