Lamp Black 2007

Rafal Bujnowski made this captivating piece, Lamp Black, with what looks like simple paint on paper. It strikes me how he’s embraced the act of seeing as a process, like a visual echo of thought itself. Look at the texture, how the paint seems pulled across the surface, those marks feel deliberate, almost architectural in their construction. See how the light floods in, contrasting sharply with the solid blacks. I think about the physicality of the medium; the paint isn't trying to hide itself here. There's a tension between the depth suggested by the scene and the flatness of the paint, it’s this play that really gets me. You might see echoes of Gerhard Richter here, in the way Bujnowski engages with photography and the painted image, inviting us to question what we see, and how we see it. It’s like he's saying, "Here's a world, but it's also just paint." And that, my friends, is the magic of art: ambiguity that lets us think and feel at the same time.