Paweł Książek. Rhizome

Sunday 13 September 2026, Lindenstraße 35. At Persons Projects, Paweł Książek's "Rhizome" has been hanging since 11 September and runs until 31 October. According to the press text laid out on the counter, they are black-and-white drawings from the series "Narrations" in graphite, charcoal and watercolour, together with a selection of new paintings. The term comes from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, who set it against the hierarchy of the tree: a root system growing in all directions, with no beginning and no end point.

The room is a white cube with a raw, unsealed concrete floor, white-painted downstand beams and two suspended fluorescent tubes as the only lighting. No daylight. A partition set in front of it blocks the view, so you never see the first wall whole.

On that first wall the same motif hangs three times, in three scales and three techniques. A large painting shows an eye in extreme close-up, lashes as dark strokes, almost monochrome in violet and grey-brown. Beside it, small and in a narrow white frame, the same eye area as a graphite drawing with a handwritten line below that cannot be deciphered. Then, smaller still, a fragment of a face in unbroken carmine, its contours blurred. Behind the partition another drawing: two frontal eyes, owl-like, with a block of text beneath, likewise unreadable.

The second wall works in a rhythm of large format, pair of drawings, large format, two small formats. On the left a form of hair or tissue streams through the picture, deep red along the lower edge. In the middle two almost square drawings hang a hand's width apart, dense undulating textures, water or sand. On the right a naked back bent forward, the hands in falling hair that turns into a dark surface of water below. Last, two small paintings: a flame above a censer-like object, beside it a white candle. They hang offset; the centre axis does not apply here.

What connects the motifs is not a subject but a behaviour of form. Hair, flame, water and reflection all resist a fixed contour; they are defined by movement and light rather than by outline. That is exactly why hair and flame hang in the same field of view, and why the rhizome title works not as a claim but as an instruction to the eye: you do not move left to right through a story, you jump between affinities.

It fits that no label hangs on any wall. No title, no year, no medium, nothing. A good two thirds of the wall surface stay empty. Anyone who wants to know what they are looking at has to walk to the counter and read the press text — or leave it, and watch the pictures refer to one another.

Photographs: Florian Jäger, 13 September 2026.