The title of Tomasz Tofilski’s upcoming solo exhibition, "Magiel", refers to the site of the artist’s studio, located in a former ironing service in Warsaw’s Praga district.

And yet, the reference is not entirely circumstantial, as Tofilski’s works do seem in need of a mangle to straighten out their wrinkled and uneven surfaces and bond them with their support—as if the artist himself were unable to stretch them “properly.”

After all, as a place of base talk and tasks rather than reflection and refinement, the mangle house occupies a rather lowly rank in the hierarchy of social interaction zones.

However, when faced with the works, one must concede that nothing is as it seems.

Tofilski’s picture-objects invite us to reflect on the current status of images, and on the relationship between image and idea, texture and trace, matter and thought, window and glass.

Nothing is easy, anything goes. Welcome to Magiel.

Text by Krzysztof Pijarski

"The thing with liquids is that they find the spot that's easiest for them to fill and they fill it with as much of themselves as they can. Sometimes I think of images as liquids and their mediums as vessels. It's funny because puddles are liquids contained by the rest of the world and photographs are images taken from the world that are later contained within it. I don't know if you can glimpse the fabric of the world in a puddle, but sometimes I get a feeling like that with photographs."

– except from "Picking up Puddles", 2023

“I see my practice as centred around aberrations that mediate our experiences. In my works the varnish, glue, and staples distort the image while simultaneously supporting it, much like the models, mechanisms or ideas that enable us to perceive and interact with art—and, by extension, the world itself. I usually picture views that bring to my mind the very mechanisms and models through which we attempt to subordinate reality.”

Tomek Tofilski