Pener

Biography

Bartek Świątecki’s (b.1981) work mixes abstraction and traditional graffiti. High art and youth culture, modernism and skateboarding. His images are based around geometric groupings and angular forms which reference futuristic architectural design. The apparent slickness of Świątecki’s productions is often at odds with the decayed settings the works are placed in. The visual language used in these pieces gives a glimpse in to a brave new world of graffiti and fine art cross over. It’s a world where graffiti writers are as happy to quote from De Stijl as they are Wu Tang.
As well as painting, Świątecki’s practice includes sculpture and installation. His sculptures are three dimensional workings of the paintings that carve triangular and pyramidal forms into real word space. Similarly, his installations contact together to make helixscapes of networked lines in public settings. In all of this work, outside of the art historical and graffiti elements, there is sense of the mapping of the digital world. Świątecki’s is re-humanising a reality which should exist on a computer monitor. And this is perhaps there greatest paradox. A graffiti writer making landscape paintings from his time in virtual reality.

Cedar Lewisohn


When you are a graffiti artist, your whole world is shaped by letters, so running away from them seems to be the most difficult thing to do.
However, it appears to be even more complicated to turn your name into something that is intersubjectively communicative. Then you change your language, and the imagery seizes being univocal. The alphabet evolves into surfaces, words become shapes and the meanings move between colours and lines.

Therefore, the works created by Bartek / Pener / Świątecki cannot be understood if we do not take into account the years of his street activities. Only then can we know the way he paved as an artist and his WRITER'S BACKGROUND will be the code to decipher his abstract figures. The figures which absorb the canvas and tell us far more than it appears while seeing the painting superficially.

The code embedded in the lines is not only the formal measure and the composition based on geometry is much more than just surfaces built on one another. The series of work titled „Cosmogramma” by Bartek / Pener / Świątecki can be interpreted through the variation put forward by him, i.e. referring to the very moment when Bartek abandoned classical graffiti and started his individual search for the essence of style.
The search has become a new genre called Graffuturism, which today constitutes the indispensable part of the modern art.
Bartek / Pener / Światecki repeatedly refers to the ideas from his beginnings and in that way, the harmony of his studio works is broken by dirt and damp patches and the typographic elements convey the consistance and perrenial efforts made to develop the unique style that characterises all Bartek's creativity.

Cezary Hunkiewicz / BrainDamage

Into Pener's work there’s a sort of catharsis. The Polish artist goes on his artistic path full of a delightful abstract attitude, working through a commutation of shapes he’ s able to achieve all of those emotional and instinctive feelings.The research phase of this author is influenced by a constant turnover of outer stirrings and unique moments given from the environment.Pener’s style is marked by abstract geometries, dragged here from his graffiti background.This abstract approach has been reached through a personal research, slowly abandoning the typing culture. His artwork appears as a result of a constant chaotic and animated twist of several shapes, able to bring to life dynamic images and to stimulate the growth of them in the work space.

The compositions, both in the studio and in the street, look built following a strong sense of depth and three-dimensionality.
The elements grow out of an irregular base and from here they go through intersections crossing the space creating more elements as a new way of expression. Some volumes are more rough and dirty than others. Pener then creates figures structured as a dance of different hues, embracing pinnacles and the lowest levels, sharp edges stuck into transparent shapes.The artist’s style traverses the space via different overlapped levels made out of a variety of colours and shades constantly trying to dare the emotions of the viewer.

A dialog between artwork and spectator takes place through lines, shapes and bodies, that powerful to cross the whole surface and trigger different games of perception portrayed by deepness instants and three-dimensional moments.
These days the author experiments a lot on smaller surfaces, as a way to evolve the research of abstract and geometric twine.
At the same time for the opus on bigger surfaces, Pener applies the same concept magnifying it: we see here the artist growing his ability of manipulating shapes. A deep sense of perpetual motion comes out, an emotive dispersion to shape the appearance of the artist’s elements. These signs become sharpen, faster, straight and subject of a savage impact while growing in the space.

Diego Fadda / GORGO Magazine

Source: swiatecki.pl