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Thursday 6 February

Sętowski: The Architect of Dancing Time

Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs. Tomasz (Tomek) Sętowski, born in 1961 in Częstochowa in southern Poland, is not your usual parlor artist painting still lifes to please Sunday-dressed bourgeoisie. No, this Polish magician is a universe creator who obliterates the boundaries between reality and fiction with technical mastery that would make your surrealist idols blush. And when I speak of technical mastery, I’m not referring to those conceptual scribbles served up at contemporary art fairs with pompous rhetoric as the garnish.

Let’s first talk about his architectural obsession, which transforms each of his canvases into a manifesto against the banality of our urban spaces. Sętowski builds impossible cities that would make Piranesi weep in his grave. His dizzying structures flout the laws of physics with jubilant arrogance that makes me smile. As Walter Benjamin wrote in “Paris, Capital of the 19th Century”: “Architecture is the most enduring witness to humanity’s latent desire”. And Sętowski pushes that desire to creative madness, to visual ecstasy.

His buildings intertwine like passionate lovers, defying gravity with breathtaking insolence. He creates floating cathedrals that rival the architectural deliriums of Ledoux, except he didn’t have to lick a monarch’s boots to realize his visions. His spiral staircases climb toward skies that exist only in his fertile imagination, creating perspectives that would have given Escher vertigo.

In his monumental compositions, architecture becomes an independent language, a vocabulary of forms telling stories even Jorge Luis Borges wouldn’t have dared to imagine. His Gothic arches twist like Möbius ribbons, his Corinthian columns dance an impossible ballet, and his domes seem to contain entire universes. It’s as if Gaudí had a child with Bosch, and that child decided to push the limits of the possible even further.

In 2000, he opened his “Museum of Imagination” in Częstochowa, transforming a simple gallery into a living architectural manifesto. As he says himself: “I created an ivory tower to escape the everyday, a state within a state.” And you know what? He’s right. Contemporary architecture too often boils down to sterile glass boxes stacked like soulless Legos. Sętowski’s dreamlike constructions are a much-needed slap to our visual laziness.

This approach to architecture as a dreamlike language isn’t without echoes of Peter Eisenman’s theories on the decomposition of architectural form, except Sętowski goes further. He doesn’t just deconstruct; he reconstructs according to rules that belong solely to him. His buildings aren’t merely structures; they are characters in their own visual narratives.

Sętowski’s second obsession, and not the least, is time. Not the kind of time from grandmother’s clocks ticking away in a dusty parlor, no. I’m talking about time as a philosophical concept, as that elusive thing slipping through our fingers while we mindlessly scroll on our phones. His clocks are everywhere, scattered throughout his compositions like so many memento mori for a generation that believes immortality can be bought on Amazon Prime with same-day delivery.

Heidegger spoke of “being-toward-death” as a fundamental condition of human existence. Sętowski transforms this existential angst into a visual feast. In his paintings, time isn’t linear. It twists and folds upon itself, creating temporal loops that would have made Einstein dizzy. The hands of his clocks point to impossible hours, as if to remind us that our obsession with measuring time is merely a comforting illusion.

It’s Henri Bergson in paint, where pure duration manifests in every brushstroke. The watches in his works don’t mark time; they distort it, creating alternate chronologies where past, present, and future collide in a macabre yet magnificent dance. His work has been exhibited alongside Dalí at the CFM Gallery, and frankly, old Salvador should have taken notes. Where Dalí played with melting clocks, Sętowski creates entire chronologies collapsing into organized chaos.

The women in his works aren’t mere objects of desire—they are guardians of these temporal portals, sometimes holding keys that open no visible locks. Here lies his genius: he doesn’t just paint time passing; he creates personal mythologies where time itself becomes a central character, an actor in his visual dramas.

Between 2006 and 2008, he conquered Dubai, exhibiting at the Burj Al Arab and Emirates Towers. Imagine this: his hallucinatory visions of time and space unfurling in these temples of modern hypercapitalism. What magnificent irony! While traders stared at their watches, sweating over their transactions, Sętowski’s works silently reminded them that time is the one thing their money will never buy.

What fascinates me about Sętowski is his ability to be technically flawless while remaining viscerally subversive. He uses the techniques of old masters to create visions that would have given the Academy of Fine Arts a collective heart attack. It’s as if Vermeer dropped LSD with William Gibson—the precision of technique in service of creative chaos.

His compositions are visual time machines transporting us to spaces where chronology is just a polite suggestion. Each painting is an invitation to lose oneself in a temporal labyrinth where seconds stretch like warm caramel and minutes waltz vertiginously with eternity.

His Museum of Imagination isn’t just a gallery; it’s a declaration of war against banality. On the ground floor, you’re greeted by a world both colorful and lugubrious, while upstairs lies his “paradise of creation”. This is where he works, far from “everyday worries and the problems of modern civilization”, as he puts it. And you know what? In a world where contemporary art often drowns in its own conceptual navel-gazing, this sincerity is refreshing.

The extraordinary sensitivity that characterizes him only sharpens with time. Now, each canvas is a portal to alternative dimensions where architecture defies gravity, and time is just a polite suggestion. This is precisely what contemporary art needs: less hollow concepts and more authentic visions that force us to look beyond our comfortable certainties.

In his more recent works, Sętowski continues to explore the boundaries between the possible and the impossible with an audacity that commands respect. His compositions have become even more complex, more labyrinthine, as if the artist himself were competing with his earlier creations. Each new painting is a surge of imagination, a fresh exploration of the infinite possibilities of human perception.

Critics have labeled him as a representative of “magical realism”, but that label is as inadequate as calling Kafka a mere storyteller. Sętowski doesn’t represent reality; he completely reinvents it, creating parallel universes where the laws of physics and time are rewritten according to his own rules. His canvases are open windows to worlds that exist only in his imagination but that, once painted, become as real as the world we inhabit.

Observing the evolution of his work from his beginnings at the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Pedagogical University of Częstochowa to today, one cannot help but be struck by the consistency of his artistic vision. Where many contemporary artists leap from one style to another like fleas on a mangy dog, Sętowski has dug his furrow with admirable determination, continually deepening his personal research. In an artistic world often polarized between sterile academic tradition and empty conceptualism, Sętowski carves out a third path, rich with possibilities.

Tomasz Sętowski continues to surprise, amaze, and challenge us. His creations are constant reminders that art can still be a transformative force, a tool for exploring possibilities, an invitation to see beyond appearances. In a world that seems to have lost its capacity for wonder, his work is a powerful antidote to the prevailing cynicism.

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