Based at Beam Gallery, Marek Tobolewski Presents 'Line'

A celebration of nearly forty years dedicated to the exploration of abstraction, Marek Tobolewski maintains to immortalise the line with curiosity and an attitude that favours accidents and experiments. The works poised within the old school house in which the Primary studios are located, fittingly, are paintings using for the most part primary colours. A stand-out that shows up in continuum is a bespoke blue blend by Tobolewski reminiscent of cobalt and International Klein Blue. For the artist, colour flows through a procession of negative space — the canvas or linen laid bare to create the tides of the lines themselves, like fissures in the earth — notably without the aid of masking tape. These are Marek Tobolewski’s hand-drawn creations which are made all the more impressive by the patience and precision they require. 

As you weave out of Beam’s cafe and into the main exhibition space, finding works in nooks as you go, an extensive granite line smudged across nine birch ply panels takes centre stage. The lightness of the room brings stark contrast to the metallic shine of the ply, as do the block colours that sit in amongst the literature in Beam’s bookshop — creating an optimum live experience for viewing the art as if it were hanging in situ in your own living room or kitchen. 

One of his oldest works on show, a yellow oil painting from 2004, sits adjacent to his most recent piece. This careful curation reveals the lineage from asymmetry to symmetry that Tobolewski’s practice has undergone since the early 2000s. Along with this, the contrast between drawings and paintings takes on a journey as if you are witnessing something private coming together before your eyes. Where the drawings appear as if they are breathing as your eyes follow the strokes, the paintings seem more static. Whether it be an illusion of the oil’s thick layering, the paintings, like a photograph, attempt to capture a singular moment of the drawing’s pulsations before it has gone forever. Susan Sontag on the reactive nature of photography springs to mind: “All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person's (or thing's) mortality, vulnerability, mutability.”

Perception is ultimately the most intriguing aspect of Tobolewski’s collection. The bold blue, yellow and black colours of a triptych, are in their own right singular works that upon closer inspection could almost be the innards of one another, like a Russian doll. A black oil on paper painting is evocative of a human torso, and the oblong outlines throughout are remindful of the brain and its matter. Similarly, though lines form the infrastructure of as much the natural world as they do architecture and anatomy — roots, branches and beyond — to me Tobolewski’s work feels more somatic than botanical, with the exception of a red oil painting on linen which is strikingly floral. The only two ink pieces of the exhibition are, by essence of the form, less contained but remain to provoke a Rorschach-like test of individual and irreplicable meaning.  

This is also evident in the chosen names of the works displayed. Rather than giving each piece a descriptive title, Tobolewski opts for coded names that speak to the materials and process used. There is no allusion given to what the works might mean to Tobolewski himself, allowing the viewer to make up their own mind without any predetermined ideas. 

Indeed, the beauty of abstraction is that the symbolism it generates is endless. The only thing to do is decide for yourselves what these floating works mean to you. Just make sure to form an orderly line when you do.

Marek Tobolewski: Line is on view at Beam Gallery until Saturday 22 October

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