Paweł Książek. Nothing Keeps Its Outline

An eye, so close that the lashes turn into dark strokes and the area around it into a grainy surface of violet and grey-brown. A few steps on, the same eye again, small, in graphite, in a thin white frame. Then a fragment of a face in unbroken carmine, about the size of the drawing, two eyes and a nose, its outlines blurred. One motif three times, at three scales, painted and drawn. That is how "Rhizome" opens, Paweł Książek's exhibition at Persons Projects on Lindenstraße, on view since 11 September. What links these pictures is that nothing in them has a fixed outline.

The room is a white cube with a raw, unsealed concrete floor, white-painted downstand beams and two suspended fluorescent tubes as the only light. There is no daylight. A partition set in front of the first wall breaks the view, so you never see that wall whole. Behind it hangs another drawing, two eyes staring straight out, owl-like, above a block of text.

According to the press release on the front desk, the show pairs black-and-white drawings from the series "Narrations", in graphite, charcoal and watercolour, with a selection of new paintings. The term comes from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, who set the rhizome against the hierarchy of the tree. They meant a root network that grows in every direction, with no beginning and no end.

Across the corner, the hang keeps a beat: large painting, drawing, corner, drawing, large painting, two small ones. On the left, a large canvas shows a figure with long curly hair from behind, one hand visible, a red robe filling the lower left half of the picture. The two landscape-format drawings hang either side of the corner and pair up across the edge. Both have blocks of text. The one on the left shows a rippling texture that could be water or sand, the one on the right a dark, spiky, fibrous one, closer to grass or fur. On the right a naked back bends forward, hands in falling hair that turns into dark water at the bottom. The two small paintings at the end hang out of line, and the centre line no longer holds for them. One shows a flame above what looks like a censer, the other a white candle.

Hair, flame, water and reflection all resist a fixed outline, and you recognise them by movement and light. That is why hair and flame share a field of view, and why the title reads here more like instructions for looking. Instead of walking left to right through a story, you jump between affinities. The hair that turns into water on the bent figure leads to the ripples in the left-hand drawing, the flame to the candle, the painted eye to the drawn one.

A good two thirds of the wall surface stays empty. That works for this show, because the gaps send the eye from one picture to the next instead of holding it on a single work. Seen on their own, the candle and the flame would come dangerously close to mood pieces. In this row they come last, after the hair and the water, and you stop reading them as devotional pictures.

Paweł Książek, "Rhizome", is at Persons Projects, Lindenstraße 35, Berlin, until 31 October.

Photographs: Florian Jäger, 13 September 2026.