Introduction

What is Potencja? It's three painters who met at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow: Karolina Jablonska (graduated 2015), Tomasz Kręcicki (graduated 2015) and Cyryl Polaczek (graduated 2014). Potencja is their joint studio. Potencja is an artist-run-space, which they ran in Krakow's Zabłocie district. Potencja is a collaborative space with other artists. Potencja is the publisher of the art-zine Łałok. A platform for curatorial projects, an artistic cooperative, a support group and even, occasionally, a film team.

Potencja is also a phenomenon that the Raster gallery in 2017 called "the most promising painting formation of recent years."
Barely four years ago, some, such as the curator of the present exhibition, were skeptical, doubting whether this promise would be fulfilled. The oversupply of promises and the lack of coverage for them are among the organizing principles of modernity. But there are, after all, exceptions to every rule. Potencja, for example - as a self-fulfilling prophecy.

What does Potencja do? It plays and works. Playing is playing with art, primarily painting. Play is working on creating images - and imaging the world. Is it possible to paint the world? Trying to paint the world would mean taking on the challenge of painting everything. It is impossible to paint everything. Which doesn't mean it's not worth trying. So Potencja artists paint figurative paintings and those that go to the limits of abstraction. Images taken from life and taken from a dream. Allegorical and direct. Conceptual and self-expressive. Referring to the language of cinema and photography and those that speak the language of pure painting. Exaggerated and economical. Authentically funny and actually quite dark. Paintings about potatoes, eyes, fingernails, accidents, movies, food, light and many other things - as well as those whose subject is the painting itself. Potency is not called  Potencja for nothing; painting is for the three artists a field of inexhaustible possibilities, most of which will not come true, but any of which can. For  Potencja, painting is like a glass of trivial truth that is half full of the extraordinary. In this sense, Potencja's painting is realistic; it resembles life to an illusion, which it does not imitate, but accompanies.

Faced with a dilemma: all or nothing, Potencja thus leans toward all. In Western culture, there are two basic ways to do everything. One finds ultimate fulfillment in the figure of the encyclopedia. The second way is allegory. An example of the second way of organizing everything is humoral theory. Unlike the encyclopedia, this theory does not attempt to answer each question individually; rather, it promises a single answer to all questions.