I am already here! We are already here. In Chełm. The launch of Apple’s new wonder coincides this year with the opening of Mobilneur’s paintings in Chełm’s Gallery 72. Well, September is a month full of attractions!
You don’t even have to try too hard – the analogy between the two events is obvious to the naked eye. You can see it and feel it.
It’s amazing… It must be smooth… Even very smooth.
It looks like a carpenter’s torture. It attracts attention, it fascinates. Each of the images, in place of one of the four corners, repeats the roundness of our smartphones. A slight, graceful spread, the essence of good design, anticipating the thought of an object’s function. Imagine the panicked media titles in a world where the smartphone has the stubby shape of a hard square with four corners that appear straight but are actually sharp as hell. How many scratches, nicks and painful scrapes have been avoided by softening the shape! Rounding the corners of a smartphone is an undeniable example of the power of the human mind to anticipate the consequences of its actions and bend even hard facts accordingly. And it happens in the iPhone 16 Pro.
And why is this in images? Why repeat it when creating images? Well, out of respect for tradition. Painting, even under the direction of contemporary avant-garde deformed reason, is still an activity that remembers its mimetic vocation. A painting should be “successful”, similar, sometimes even faithful. It is precisely these excerpts, reproduced in such detail, that are a nod to traditional expectations of the function of painting and the image. And that is enough to express respect for the mimetic tradition. The rest of the abstract, textured, smooth is about an unclear future that we see as a new possibility that we do not yet understand, like a new function on our mobile phone. We will have to look more closely at these spun rectangles, at our leisure. Maybe even touch them, if no one can see them?
Maybe you can get away with it in Chełm. It is worth it. It is worth it to start practising techno-shifting today, to like it even more.
Like touch, technochange will transform painting and paintings. You can still buy beautifully published albums on Impressionism or historical painting “as a gift”, but if you want to move in the everyday, you have no choice. You have to get used to involuntarily, reflexively touching a lot of paintings, projections of icons. Without such a reflex, you will not be able to open the lift doors. This exhibition (Exhibition of Paintings by Mobilneur) is partly about this change in habits, reflexes, touches, which affects us so directly. By wandering with the eye over smooth areas of colour, it is unexpectedly possible to realise how imperceptibly and constantly our experience of touch is changing.