ADAM KOZICKI: EVERYONE AT WAR WITH EVERYONE ELSE

In his new show, Adam Kozicki looks inside the throbbing, restless pulse of today’s Internet—a space where culture wars unfold without end and fragmented streams of information generate emotional tension, blurring the boundaries between fact, opinion, and feeling. Kozicki approaches the Web as a realm in which competing identities and value systems collide, each laying claim to its own exclusive righteousness. At the same time, it becomes a space where desires are articulated and tested against the shifting limits of what society considers acceptable—and what it is actually willing to accept.

 

The starting point for the show were online reality shows and round-the-clock broadcasts such as Fishtank LIVE, where social norms are constantly—and deliberately—violated, both in language and behavior, in order to attract and retain viewers. Participants are confined to spaces monitored 24/7, often bringing radically different political views with them and driven, more than anything else, by financial difficulties. Viewers do not simply watch events unfold but can intervene directly through paid messages, quests, dares, and other forms of interaction. The broadcast thus becomes reality show, performance, social experiment, and laboratory of power relations all at once.

Kozicki, however, does not approach these Internet phenomena as mere curiosities, nor does he judge them from any kind of moral high ground. Instead, his work depicts a world in which reality and spectacle are becoming increasingly difficult to tell apart. He sees digital communities as microcosms that offer their participants a sense of belonging and acceptance, however unstable or compromised, while also holding out the possibility of improving their material circumstances.

 

Kozicki’s portraitures and claustrophobic interiors resemble scenographies—but with no stable narratives to fill them. Protagonists are invariably ambiguous: patchwork identities caught up in perpetual mutation, interpenetrating and falling apart upon subsequent projections. Titles of works might suggest antiheroes, transgressive loners; but the artist himself sees his subjects differently, as individuals who accumulate a special kind of excess: too much emotion, stimuli, and tension, but also too much pleasure. In these evocative portraits, faces seem familiar and strange at once, as if each was worn by a number of different people; like avatars, circulating between platforms, pictures, and social roles. As such, his paintings portray genuine emotional and social lives, drawing on both his own experiences and those of people close to him.

By airbrushing oil paint and acrylic ink onto the canvas, Kozicki creates dense textures that make the represented figures collapse into their backdrops, the latter implying home. Although the works reference a world ruled by images both generated and distributed digitally, Kozicki rejects the use of artificial intelligence for composing his pieces. Whatever he represents, it is born of human imagination alone—of remembered scenes, events, and emotions—to then come to be represented in one of the most traditional artistic mediums.