Publisher's Synopsis
At first glance, Partyka's painting plunges us, without transition, into a crude universe, penetrated by impetuous and antagonistic forces. His works appear as deliberately damaged palimpsests, battered surfaces, sometimes crossed-out, sometimes roughly scratched, collaged and/or decollaged. Along with his roughly etched, resonant and incantatory words, Partyka invokes fragments of Old Master paintings. Caravaggio, Courbet, Matejko, Rembrandt, Rothko, Velázquez and Vermeer coalesce in his personal and anarchic rewriting of art history. Partyka blithely vandalises his canvases, frankly trampling conventions. It is not about seeing pure negation, encouraged by his sombre palette, but about dissident non-conformism against establishment art, a rebellious
