Światło małego miasteczka (Small Town Light), 2025

Agata Słowak

Agata Słowak: My name is Agata Słowak. I live and work in Warsaw. The painting I am presenting at the exhibition is titled Small Town Light. It’s special to me because my painting process is usually built piece by piece, in many layers. Here, I allowed myself a more decisive form. Close to non finito. I was interested in tension. The starting point was the experience of being seen – the moment when the gaze ceases to be neutral and begins to function as a tool of control.

In this painting, light does not so much illuminate as it listens in, like a spotlight that pulls a figure out of privacy and exposes? it to public view. It becomes a symbol of the norm, something that disciplines the body and assigns it a specific role. The small town of the title is not a concrete place, but a structure.

It is a place where the community builds its identity through looking. Locality becomes a mechanism for producing shame and exposure. Private emotion quickly becomes public matter. It is difficult to separate what is intimate from what is controlled. The pink background can be read as a candy-coloured facade, beneath which tension is hidden. Aesthetic softness contrasts with the violence of the gaze. A scream appears – a crack in this system of visibility, an act of resistance against the rule imposed by others.