Tomasz Kręcicki Power Strip, 2026

With Power Strip, executed in oil on canvas, Tomasz Kręcicki turns to the appliances and instruments of his own working life — stoves, hot plates, washing machines, and now the apparatus that powers them. Each is enlarged to a scale that pushes the ordinary object past representation. The large-scale painting depicts a power strip with three cables plugged into its sockets, the plugs varying in shape and size. It is held in deep blue-black tones throughout; at the far right edge, the on-switch glows red, indicating the strip is live. That single point of color against the dark ground gives the object a quiet, mysterious charge.

Such everyday objects recur throughout Kręcicki's practice as vehicles for existential inquiry, their ordinariness amplifying the cryptic narratives they are made to carry. Scale is central to how this operates: the painting imposes a size on the object rather than extrapolating one from it, so that the power strip is not so much represented as reconstructed. The frontal, perspectiveless treatment also pushes the composition toward the geometric — a horizontal bar and three vertical forms — so that the still life verges on abstraction without quite arriving there. The motif locates Kręcicki in the lineage of Rafał Bujnowski's Paintings, Objects (1999–2002), in which everyday things were treated as the proper occasion for painting.