Surfers at Night 2022

Iwo Zaniewski made this drawing, Surfers at Night, at an unknown date using what looks like wax crayon. It's a process of layering, pushing the medium around to create a sense of depth. Look at how the marks create a kind of loose geometry to the image, the way the dark blues of the sky press down on the other colours, forcing them together. I notice the way the colour acts almost like an internal light, glowing through the lines. The image is a tangle of dark tones, punctuated by red tents, bright surfboards and hints of light in the board game in the foreground. There's an interesting tension between the flatness of the picture plane and the sense of spatial recession, which reminds me of Alex Katz's paintings. But where Katz uses light and shadow to describe the scene, Zaniewski uses colour and line. This creates a feeling of ambiguity and playfulness. It's like we're looking at a memory, or a dream.