Maciej Toporowicz at Lombard-Freid - art exhibition - Brief Article

Art in America, Sept, 2000 by Sarah Valdez

Maciej Toporowicz has earned art-world notoriety for his mock ad campaigns, which take the esthetics of popular fashion brand names and imbue them with subversive content. In hopes of revealing the dangerous and hegemonizing psychology of capitalist culture, his "Obsession" series, for instance, associated Third Reich propaganda images of good-looking Aryans with images of beautiful people used in Calvin Klein's perfume ads. In another effort to harden soft-edged conceptions of global consumer reality, Toporowicz made "ads" out of photos he took of HIV-positive children ("Baby Gap") and Thai sex workers ("Lure"). "Shiseido pour homme," a series of large, abstract, black-and-white photographs of female genitalia that even one of his dealers has described as "hard to look at," landed the artist in a lawsuit with the cosmetics company targeted in the title.

Toporowicz's latest show, "Stairs 2 Heaven," was a change of pace. The exhibition comprised highly esthetic black-and-white photographs, a black-and-white video and graphite drawings on Plexiglas (painstakingly rendered and sprayed afterward with a fixative). All of these depict Japanese architectural environments--coldly beautiful buildings characterized by severe lines and reflective surfaces, including shopping centers, convention centers and escalators.

One photo shows the front side of a marble staircase mirroring a street teeming with traffic, while two identically dressed Asian girls make their way down the steps, appearing otherworldly in their congruence. A metal handrail beside them catches light, emanating a ghostly glow. Another photo shows a glass-encased bridge between buildings. The structure coolly dominates the people who walk through it, small bodies in a web of shadows. The scene seems to comment on a reality at once impersonal and sublime.

Though Toporowicz is still engaged with the existential condition of powerlessness against the systems that surround us, he expresses himself in more hushed tones. The pencil drawings on Plexiglas depict department stores and airports shape-shifting into ziggurats and aircraft carriers, suggesting a oneness of design among the edifices. His video examines an escalator moving in slow motion, and is accompanied by a soundtrack of a Buddhist mantra, which Toporowicz recorded at a monastery in Taipei. The purpose of continually uttering a mantra such as the one in Toporowicz's video is that the mantra, rather than one's outward activities in the world, becomes the object of one's concentration. The repetitiveness of the buildings that define our modern urban existence, in Toporowicz's hands, is elevated in the same way. Though the standardized structures of urban life dominate the very beings who create them, they might also provide the opportunity to move beyond the material world, diminishing the stature of individuals to the point of glorious insignificance.