ART and Research

Matter Refuses to Be Silent - Foajégalleriet, University of South-Eastern Norway, 2026

The paintings take their starting point in matter as an active force rather than as passive surfaces. Ink and water are not treated as tools for representation, but as collaborators with their own will, resistance, and tendencies that shape the works as they come into being. The brushstroke encounters forces that exceed intention. The artist’s mental state is a condition. Rather than dictating outcomes, this state guides the paintings in an unknown direction and allows decisions to emerge in collaboration with water, ink, and Ecoline.

The ink spreads, bleeds, floods the paper’s mountains and valleys, and gathers where gravity decides. The water dilutes the ink and carries the soot particles toward an unknown fate. Ecoline and ink are in constant conflict, bound by physical laws to create marks that nevertheless seem anything but accidental. At the core of the process lies a commitment rooted in care, patience, and openness toward the materials. Is this a form of love for what exist? A love understood as a refusal to dominate, where matter is given space to speak.

At the same time, the painting process is driven by rage. Not an explosive or declarative rage, but a persistent tension shaped by ongoing global conflicts, violence, and systemic failure. These states are not illustrated; they are transferred to the paper as pressure, splashes, dripping, shaking, or blowing. The world’s conflicts and fury enter the work as abstract force, yet suddenly figurative narratives appear, the human self.

The paintings make room for care and rage, panic and serenity, intimacy and distance. Rage does not stand in opposition to love but is intertwined with it. It springs from a place where care once existed. Powerlessness transforms care into rage. Rage tries to restore something that was lost. Rage is grief in disguise.

Then comes the collage, a statement irrevocably fastened to the paper, a bandage for painful accidents.
Matter Refuses to Be Silent proposes that meaning does not precede materiality. In a time marked by conflict, the works do not seek to represent the world, but to reveal that which cannot be silenced.

Photo: Marek Podowski