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Turnus site
Bremond Capela gallery, Paris
Sept 3 - Oct 10, 2026
Putting her down, 50x70 cm, 2026
© photo Bartosz Zalewski
a slightly altered name. An irregularity almost imperceptible, yet distinctive enough to betray the copy.
The error may not be what falsifies the map, but what allows us to recognize the hand that drew it.
This idea resonates with the way Karolina Szwed constructs her paintings. She rarely works from a fixed image, preferring to rely on what memory has retained, simplified, or displaced. Routes glimpsed from a plane, plans, crossings, silhouettes, or sewing patterns return without attempting to recover their original form exactly.
In Cadastral Fabric, an almost entirely invented network of roads mingles with the fragmentary memory of a shirt pattern. Observed, remembered, and invented elements thus coexist within the same image.
(...)
© Courtesy of Bremond Capela and Karolina Szwed © Photo Nicolas Brasseur
This displacement concerns gesture as much as motif. Szwed is interested in handwriting,
note-taking, and stenography for what they reveal about the relationship between intention and
form. Before it is even read, a sign already carries a speed, a pressure, a hesitation. A few marks
can condense information; a minute variation is enough to alter its reading. Repetition offers no
guarantee of recovering the first formulation: the gesture is performed again, but never returns
unchanged.
This impossibility of exact repetition directly informs her painting process. Szwed paints, erases,
covers over, and begins again. Some surfaces become paintings, notebooks, and workspaces at once:
notes, tasks, or motifs appear and are then erased once they are no longer useful. Yet oil imposes its
own memory. An inscription left too long, a line pressed too firmly, or an earlier layer may refuse to
disappear completely. The painting is built as much from what was intended as from what resists
erasure.
A form can thus emerge at the very moment the artist is trying to remove another; what
belonged to an earlier version can suddenly redirect the next. In Trap Street, a canvas begun as an
interpretation of a pedestrian crossing passes through several studios and numerous reworkings.
Beneath successive layers, fragments of the original street re-emerge until they form a new image.
The detour becomes the method.
This way of working gives the paintings a character that is at once familiar and difficult to place.
Roads, windows, streetlights, planes, figures, or architectures appear as recognizable fragments
whose origins cannot always be identified. Rather than elements of a narrative, they function as
provisional landmarks, preserved and transformed by memory. Every return is already a rewriting.
Text: via Bremond Capela gallery
© Courtesy of Bremond Capela and Karolina Szwed © Photo Nicolas Brasseur
works and drawings from the exhibition (swipe):