Rafał Topolewski's latest exhibition, Slumber, on view at GRIMM in Amsterdam, captures the hallucinatory state between sleep and wakefulness, an unsettling suspension of time and place where plants, portraits and landscapes lose definition and slip between figurative and abstracted motifs. Recurring images of clockfaces and the artist’s unblinking eye capture the uneasy feeling of operating outside of consciousness, of losing time and finding oneself out of step with reality.
The subjects of Topolewski’s paintings share an earthy, ochre-hued tone, capturing the strangeness of the crepuscular hours between day and night. This curious environment draws an allusion between the subjects of the paintings and Topolewski’s interest in states outside of sleep and wakefulness, where memories, dreams, and reality blur together in the fragmentary language of his work. In this suggestible state, the artist’s work invites viewers to immerse themselves in an uncanny space where logic and reason give way to intuition and emotion.
