Following his bold debut in the late 2010s, Paweł Śliwiński was identified as one of the most promising members of the generation that Jakub Banasiak has called “tired of reality”—artists reaching for surrealist poetics. In Śliwiński’s work, we can indeed find motifs alluding to various modernist trends from the first half of the 20th century. But the essence of the artist’s painting project is not a dialogue with history, but introspection, a journey to the furthest—and often darkest—corners and states of mind and soul. “Subpersonality” can also be viewed in the perspective of such expeditions. In this painting, Śliwiński employs his characteristic grotesque, phantasmagoric figuration not so much to paint fantasy worlds, as to approach the realism of inner life, and perhaps even a kind of allegorical self-portrait. 

Stach Szabłowski