From the series: Weeping Landscapes

Tomasz Ciecierski works in painting, drawing, photography and collage. From the late 1980s the theme of landscape appeared in the artist's work, then still expressed simultaneously on a single support. Among others, such works - capturing in one composition a kind of photographic, frame-by-frame record - could be seen during the artist's exhibition organised in 1990 at the Museum of Art in Łódź. It may be assumed that it was then, too, that the artist's idea arose concerning the study of space in his painting by means of the horizon line, of which he says: It turned out that the horizon line orders the painting absolutely. It builds depth. It is enough to juxtapose two planes of blue colour and we obtain a horizon line and an impression of three-dimensionality. The next stage, connected with reflections on the building of space and at the same time with the thought of transcending the specificity of the painting medium, was the device used by Tomasz Ciecierski of the rhythmic multiplication of successive canvases permanently joined together, at the same time hiding earlier elements of the work, of which the artist says: I very much like to paint landscapes, but only after juxtaposing, superimposing and multiplying do I speak about space more fully. Waldemar Baraniewski called this device image-montage. Montage, or more precisely the collage technique, is also visible in Tomasz Ciecierski's small landscape compositions, where onto an original landscape the artist glues cuttings of other painterly works. These fragments are elements of his other canvases. Tomasz Ciecierski does not limit himself only to painting. He photographs his small paintings against a white wall at various times of day, approaching the subject in a painterly way. He allows the prints to bear the trace of the sun in the form of a yellowish tonality of the photograph, or of the evening, when the light is sometimes darker or bluish. He also photographs painting utensils. He collects postcards, cuttings and Polaroid photographs, in order then to juxtapose them with the painterly version of the landscape or to build from them a pattern for creating his own landscape.