Paweł Książek’s Narration series is a constellation of autonomous drawings that bring together visual elements and text, creating a space where visuals and language coexist in tension and resonance. The drawings are created in a way that keeps their meaning open, rather than fixed. The images do not directly show what the text says, and the text does not fully explain the images, even though they may sometimes relate. Instead, words and images work on their own while still influencing each other, creating a space of different possible meanings, where the image often plays a key role.

Rendered in a restrained monochrome palette, the works move between figuration and abstraction, presenting fragments of bodies, textures, mechanical forms, traces of faces, and indeterminate landscapes, as if retrieved from a subconscious archive. Suspended between recognition and disappearance, they evoke traces emerging from memory and perception.

Drawing on traditions of conceptual and postwar art, the series resonates with practices that explore the relationship between image, language, and thought. It echoes the textual investigations of Joseph Kosuth and Art & Language, while the material density and tonal depth evoke Anselm Kiefer’s integration of text and image as carriers of historical and philosophical reflection.

Like William Kentridge, Książek approaches drawing as a form of thinking, where image becomes a site for memory and reflection. Yet while Kentridge’s work is often performative and narrative, his practice is contemplative and inward-looking, centered on stillness and the slow unfolding of meaning.

The artist’s texts function not as captions but as parallel structures of thought, reflecting on absence, distance, and the instability of meaning. Seeing and reading become intertwined acts, suggesting narration as an open and dispersed process rather than a linear story.

Through layered surfaces and grainy textures, Książek emphasizes the materiality of the image. His drawings reveal a remarkable sensitivity to tone, texture, and detail, where subtle gradations and assured mark-making underscore both technical precision and a deeply reflective approach to image-making, inviting sustained attention to the relationship between image, text, and perception.
This approach opens a space for reflection on the relationship between matter and form. Following Bachelard, one can speak of material imagination (a mode of imagining rooted in physicality and the senses), which becomes compelling when it touches fundamental human reveries and restores to thought the logic of dreaming.