DOMOBAAL

Neil Zakiewicz: Big Names

22.11.25 – 20.12.25

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(image: Neil Zakiewicz 'Lou' acrylic on wood, wood subframe, 61×49cm 2025)

 

domo baal is delighted (tickled pink actually) to present … 'Big Names' … Neil Zakiewicz's fourth solo exhibition in the gallery, a sort of Part II to his solo 'Blinkys' of exactly one year ago … these guys and gals have been knocking at the door insisting on being let in: Lou Reed, Andy Warhol, Mum, Picasso, Dad … portraits anyone?

 

Concrete Portraits:
Karolina Albricht on Neil Zakiewicz

What is the point of a painted portrait now?, I wonder, as I start writing about an exhibition of portrait paintings. Certainly, portraiture continues to thrive through the likes of Elizabeth Peyton, Chantal Joffe, and Lynette Yiadom–Boakye, amongst so many. Yet these painters' engagement with the genre has little to do with what Zakiewicz's work proffers. Instead of painterly, graceful refinement and buttery bravura — a longing for pre–photographic romanticism — his paintings appear to sidestep such sentiments. He paints people who matter to him: family, peers, artists he admires. Or, more accurately, he assembles them — from blocks of colour, directional lines, typographic marks. These are constructions, or perhaps de–and–re–constructions, not depictions of people (I now recall Sillman's line painting is a construction site). The familiar markers of portraiture are still there: a face, a name, an initial. But everything is scrupulously distilled by Zakiewicz's digestive system of signs: hair becomes a roof, a face an architectural plan, letters become eyes, chins, heads, noses… or the reverse: eyes, chins, heads, noses become letters. Letters that barely look like letters. Pushed further, in paintings like Emma/Stu, Lou, Pablo, the letters are the actual carriers of identity, not just semiotically, but as visual and compositional elements that mold the likeness of the 'sitter'. I must add that it is bespoke typography — Zakiewicz invents specific fonts that he deems fit transmitters of the painted personage. Perhaps, following the premise of Concrete Poetry, these paintings should be called Concrete Portraits.

Zakiewicz's portraits are systems of relations, not images of flesh. Seeing them, I'm reminded of Picasso’s question — What is a face, really? That which is in front? Inside? Behind? And the rest? The memory of a person and how a person lives in one's mind are extracted with care and attention (I specifically imagine that this is done with a crane) and transplanted into diagrams of connections, as if the act of remembering or thinking about someone is done through the shape of their presence. Nota bene — no shape is wasted: a cut–out corner is swiftly utilised as positive space elsewhere; a chimney is echoed as a mouth; signs and shapes double, triple, rhyme — there are things to find in these paintings. Through this formal wit, a coded humour emerges, and it is also through humour that Zakiewicz manages to capture the very essence of his subjects. Here, humour is a tool of distillation, or abbreviation, but not reduction.

One should not mistake humour for trifle. This is a serious subject, Zakiewicz confirms. The people he chooses to paint are never strangers or arbitrary; they are present in his life, thoughts, and memory, whether he has met them or not. The formal vocabulary that recalls industrial signage, Constructivism, and Bauhaus design simultaneously establishes a sign as affection, a visual system for friendship or human bond.