London, 2020:

Natural Order

The Unit London, Mayfair, March 10 - April 16

Staniak’s textured paintings highlight the phenomena of both our physical and virtual environment. The tromp l’oeil effect employed in the paintings ensures a variety of visual interpretations: the viewer’s position, either on or offline, affects the subsequent experience. When the paintings are viewed on the screen, the texture is emphasised; when viewed physically they seem flat, like a digital print or a backlit screen. His paintings are reminiscent of cosmic topographies viewed by satellite imaging, or microscopic surfaces blown up to macro levels. Looking at Staniak’s pieces is like entering an uncharted environment: one where lithic surfaces have been imprinted by time and the elements, until a gently undulating surface remains.

The exhibition, Natural Order, focuses on how technology can be used to make sense of the myriad of capricious information that is readily available online. Having to navigate this virtual landscape poses many new challenges, like entering a strange yet captivating landscape without a map. In this new series of HDF paintings, Staniak’s signature casting compound textures and saturated, screen-like hues are treated with an extra visual device. Geometric compositions dissect his seemingly random and improvised gestures into more ordered areas of information. This series of paintings fuse elements of traditional and new technologies to reinterpret his textural information. His shapes and lines, formed using screen-based software and applied to the surfaces through UV flatbed printing, act like markers or borders amongst the seemingly random texture. The results resemble a digitally mapped environment, one tamed by technological advancement.