“Solve et coagula” examines contemporary rituals — both everyday and intuitive, as well as those rooted in ancient practices that reconnect the human being with the earth, community, and the transformation of matter. The artists show that rituals have not disappeared; rather, they have taken new forms in which gestures of exchange, sacrifice, and memory remain active, though often invisible. The earth becomes a space of transition, where the human and the non-human, the living and the dead, intertwine within a single circulation. In a world deprived of stable points of reference, ritual returns as a way of domesticating fear and constructing community.
“Solve et coagula” — “dissolve and coagulate” — in translation dissolve and merge, is one of the fundamental principles of alchemy. It describes the process of the dissolution of form so that a new one may emerge. There is no transformation without prior dispersion, nor crystallization without fire. This formula describes both matter and inner experience: a moment of crisis and disintegration that can lead to rebirth and a new, coherent whole.
The exhibition is a meeting of two distinct yet complementary artistic practices. Paweł Sobczak — painter, installation and film artist — treats the image as a living substance in which gesture, pigment, and layers of paint construct a space between creation and destruction. Patrycja Orzechowska works with photography, readymade objects, and ceramics. On the one hand, her visual medium precisely arrests a moment — a fleeting fragment of reality; on the other, clay appears — a material originating from the earth, deeply embedded in time and process. Their languages differ, yet they converge at the point where materiality becomes an experience of transformation.