KOMOREBI KOMPLEX | Jarmuschek + Partner
June 21–August 2, 2025
Glistening white spots form between the intertwined branches. The light appears to break through organic patterns. The brightness stands out. Immediately captivates the eye. At first glance, you sense more than you see. In Japanese, there is a word for this natural spectacle: komorebi. Literally translated, it means “rays of sunlight seeping through trees”. It is the idea that the sun meanders through the leaves into people, creating a connection between the observer and the observed.
There are moments, for example when you tilt your head back too quickly, when your gaze briefly flickers. We no longer just see what is in front of us, but also feel how our body works, our pupils focus and our brain searches for familiar patterns. Patrick Cierpka captures these moments in which the environment and people merge in the field of vision, challenging us to take on an active role as observers, to question and reflect. Do I see a treetop because it exists or because the painting depicts familiar patterns? The motifs, the branches and waves also exist unobserved, but their depiction is defined by Cierpka‘s gaze. His works are based on subjective perception, which renders the question of reality obsolete. Instead of documentation, they function through association. They reproduce the thoughtful observation of nature, invite us to search for memories and thus change with the person standing in front of them. This principle can be turned on with each image layer.
In SILENZIO, Patrick Cierpka includes people in the motif. The clash of abstraction and objectivity in the pictorial space specifically addresses human selective perception. What do we block out and where do we get stuck? What does our focus say about us? Are the figures to be understood as equal components to their surroundings or as a superficial motif? Patrick Cierpka‘s works provoke larger questions about the interaction between people and their surroundings; they search for the intersection between the different dimensions. He plays with the moment in which time, space and the viewer merge into one image. Together they form a unique new entity.
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REMIX | Jarmuschek + Partner
November 16, 2019 – January 25, 2020
To turn staggeringly around the own axis, to feel the wind, the speed, losing all sense of time and space, while at the same time merging completely with them... Movement is more than locomotion, more than a mere contrast to standstill. It determines how we perceive and experience our surroundings, how we locate ourselves in our experience of reality.
The phenomenologist Henri Bergson (1859-1941) describes movement as change in space, which for us is synonymous with our sense of time. This goes hand in hand with the fact that conscious perception of movement as a flowing „transition from calm to calm“, the feeling of „to somehow inhibit the passage of time and to hold the future already in the hand.“
In his luminous snapshots that magically capture us, Patrick Cierpka shows that the experience of movement can be just as hypnotizing as the immersion into a drawing matter: The waves of a lake in the twilight like in „SPIRIT“ or the rapid rotary movement of a carousel like in „TRAUMFÄNGER“ - the powerful colours captivate us and at the same time make us aware of the uniqueness and universality of these impressions.
To capture moments in their entire density and to make us questioning our sense of time while sinking into them - this artistic goal is achieved by Patrick Cierpka through showing the passing reality as a photographic stream of consciousness, which sets our „inner cinematograph“ in motion. To see the experience of the moment as a creative act means to put the viewer as perceiver in an active position. Cierpka creates visual and painterly experiences and plays with the crossfades to challenge our ability to focus.
The experience of blinking when looking directly into the blinding sunlight, as in „NOW TIME“ or in its glittering reflections on the water in „MEDIUM (S)“ seems almost like an overexposure of our perception, dematerialized by the glistening white that catches our gaze. The result is a kind of afterimage, both visually and in our experience, which remains in the moment when everything around us continues to move. The interplay of the light and the intense rich colors create a kind of concentrated nature experience. The suggested fuzziness allows to experience the painting on multiple levels, different impressions interfere and contours melt. These transitions prolong the floating state of the gaze even further and permit the captured moments a remarkable duration and depth, which makes us merge with them.
Using representational elements, Patrick Cierpka awakes our personal memories by hinting at universal experiences and feelings. At the same time, he paints abstract color impressions that are able to cause numerous different associations in our imagination. In this way the artist creates visual experiences, which draw us deeper and deeper into their spell, until the time seems to be completely standing still.
Text (German OV): Sabine Mehnert
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Tagesspiegel, July 27, 2019 | “Mehr Berlin” by Christiane Meixner
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TAGNACHT | Jarmuschek + Partner
May 3 – June 14, 2014
A look towards the sun changes perception. For a short moment one is blinded and on the human retina after-images develop that constitute the delayed reaction of the eye reacting to the stimulus of light. Within the consideration of the individual environment outlines dissolve, overlay and new motifs evolve. This is exactly what happens in the new works of Patrick Cierpka. Therein he continued a series of back light motifs, opposing night and day. During the day the bright sky is shining between twigs and leaves, during the night there are the glaring and arti cial lights, captured as a re ection on shiny surfaces and spatially staged searchlights.
Apparently gurative objects distort within the eye of the spectator to abstract forms and vice versa lines and circles specify to evidently haptically experiencable objects. In “zero“ light re exes dissolve clear out- lines, at rst the eye is unsuccessfully trying to nd more sources of light within the picture but nally nds the “point zero“ in the background of the image that is delivered by some red writing. “Bombejour“ is putting glistening beams of sunlight into the focus. From its intensity also a change of perception evolves that leaves the image to oscillate between abstraction and guration.
The artist leaves the viewer a lot of room to discover his images whose formal orientation is deliberately left open. Moreover Patrick Cierpka creates an aesthetic that was to be noticed in his early works and has now been enlarged by further pictorial shade. The concentration on light and shadow, light and dark, positive and negative develops to be the essence of the works in his current exhibition „TAGNACHT“ (“daynight“) in the gallery Jarmuschek + Partner.
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ich war kurz blind | Jarmuschek + Partner
November 5 – December 17, 2011
In his current works, Patrick Cierpka takes the observer to flickering, opulently colourful vistas which leave those viewing his work searching in vain for clear outlines. Branches and woodland blur in such a way that the onlooker feels as though they have been staring at the sun for too long.
The title of the exhibition can be taken literally: “ich war kurz blind” (temporary blindness), which describes the exact moment which occurs after one has spent a long time staring at direct sunlight. For a second or two, everything around the onlooker seems very bright, white even. In order to leave this state of kaleidoscopic overkill, the onlooker needs to blink several times to be able to see their environment again.
It is exactly this fleeting “moment” between overkill and return to normal vision that Patrick Cierpka has put on canvas. The vivid colours also make us wobble and continue to draw us in until – after the whirring has stopped– we gain access to the abstract fundament of his pictorial world..
“ich war kurz blind” (temporary blindness) is Patrick Cierpka’s second exhibition in the “Halle am Wasser” in Berlin and shows a new spectrum of his work. He plays with the perception of those looking at his work and puts this to the test. In a time when the human eye is overloaded with “background noise”, Cierpka searches for the short-lived, fleeting personal memory of the moment.