Painting in the Livingroom 2021

Editor: This is Iwo Zaniewski’s "Painting in the Livingroom" created in 2021, made using drawings and pastel techniques. It has this intense, almost dreamlike quality. What's your take on it? Curator: What strikes me immediately is the staging of domesticity itself. Can we even say who owns this stage? I see the way Zaniewski captures a lived-in space; the intimacy, that quiet confrontation of art-making within everyday life. The layering of patterns—the sofa, the rug— creates a visual field mirroring the complex layers of lived experience. How do you read the relationship between the figures? Editor: I noticed the figures. There are two figures here: a person on the sofa and an artist standing behind an easel. I don't see much of a relationship between them. Is this a moment of quiet reflection, or is it meant to be more provocative? Curator: The artist present in the very act of creating within the domestic sphere... Isn’t that inherently provocative? It disrupts traditional power dynamics by bringing the creative process into a space typically associated with femininity and leisure. Also, this gaze: whom does it serve? Whose reality are we seeing here? Do you notice how the artist and their art literally obscure our vision? Editor: Yes, that's an interesting way to frame it. Seeing the figures in the context of their domestic environment allows me to consider Zaniewski's intent to show how one's domestic place is a space of comfort and work. I see this is less about what's going on in the image and more about how it's happening, with art always mediating. Curator: Precisely. And perhaps also interrogating, don't you think? By showing the act of painting, the artist shows the work of producing these ideas of comfort and the quotidian that shape how we see the world. Thanks to that layering, that disruption and obscurity you noted, we’re drawn in to examine who profits and who suffers within those constructions. Editor: I never looked at art in this intersectional way. Thank you for shedding new light on that perspective.