ABOUT THE ART OF MOBILNEUR
STARTING FROM THE FINISHED ONE
When you paint on your phone you start with a finished one. It is proud that you have chosen it, this one of the twelve gallery entries of the month, continue with it. When you're done, you leave it right there in this gallery – the Mobilneur Gallery.
Mobilneur’s Gallery
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When painting on your phone you need a canvas – we'll supply you with a canvas. Your phone needs colour – we'll supply you with colour inks. You need a white medium – we'll supply you with a medium – we've spent years working on its wonderful properties.
The Mobilneur kit will allow you to paint on your phone.
So little and yet so much.
I’m painting my phone
I’m ordering the set
ABOUT THE IMAGES OF MOBILNEUR
LIKE IMAGE, LIKE WORLD
You choose among twelve phones. Choose one of them. Choose the right moment. The choice will become the beginning of the New.
The idea is to create a personal painterly record that is filled with an individual idea. This process brings the creator a sense of stopping over something personal, and it brings us a sense of regaining a lost common language. The moment seems dazzling, most interesting, necessarily the most intimate. We loose the need to look for other aspects of the image, which begins to be constructed not inside us, but outside. At this point, the ability to imagine a composition in advance loses its importance, it becomes much more important to be sensitive to an object with a compact, internal structure, to search critically in the unfettered act of spontaneous creation. When you create on your phone the world slows down for a moment. Why to create it? To perceive someone in his or her singularity means to perceive what escapes that very person, as a result of which the world escapes us. In the individual record lies its originality. Not in the mirrors we want to believe in, nor in the lens that has conveyed it to us. Another phone in the Mobilneur gallery. Yours. Still at the end, but already in the Gallery. But also at the beginning of a long road of breaking through and seducing the world. Once in a while we will show them all in a special place, they will measure with each other another interval of time, a regained sense of shared reality. Always different, and still the same. To reach the image of oneself is to reach the world. Now, if you recognise yourself as a necessary condition for reaching out, start painting yourself.
You can paint on your phone.
Order the Mobilneur kit for painting on your phone.
You can do anything...
GALLERY
April 2025
Andrzej Walczak’s M. Gallery
MOBILNEUR’S WORLDS
The world had much of Lynch.
And the world had a lot of him. For a moment, so crotchety, Łódź had him too. It had a ... more
And the world had a lot of him. For a moment, so crotchety, Łódź had him too. It had a wonderful master. Lynch reinvented us, reinvented the centre of Łódź.
Among the factory ruins, he found the mystery that inspired his imagination. „Unusual remnants of the Industrial Revolution! There are hardly any places like this left today. Łódź has a soul. That’s why I liked it so much” – a few years after the opening of his exhibition at Atlas Sztuki, David Lynch was still impressed by his first visit to a city he had “fallen in love with in an instant”. These words are forever etched in the heart of the city. Today we say goodbye to David Lynch, but we do not say goodbye to his presence. In these factories, in these paintings, in every inspiration that fills the spaces of Łódź, his spirit will remain forever. Łódź has a soul, more visible and stronger thanks to him.
Thank you, David. Thank you for all the pictures, for all the words that helped us to believe that light is sought even in the shadows. Fortune turns on a wheel, but your wheel – the one inscribed on the façade of W20 – will remain with us. Forever.
January 23rd, 2006. Minus 18 degrees Celsius. Łódź, Poland.
There are few cars on the streets of Łódź, most of them stuck in huge snowdrifts. Ice-covered roads glisten in ... more
There are few cars on the streets of Łódź, most of them stuck in huge snowdrifts. Ice-covered roads glisten in the sun. At 10am, the notary’s office on Żwirki Street is still empty. Slowly, journalists and reporters began to trickle in. Then the heroes of the day arrived: American director David Lynch, architect and businessman Andrzej Walczak and director of the Camerimage film festival Marek Żydowicz. They disappear behind the door. There is no point in peering, because the glass panes in the door are cut in such a way that everything inside is distorted.
Time passes slowly in the cool air, filled with the aura of anxious waiting. Finally, the door swings open. Three men are sitting behind a table, smiling. They have just set up a foundation. In front of them is a forest of microphones, photojournalists fighting to get as close as possible.
“I fell in love with Łódź, its atmosphere and its buildings, from the first time I visited,” David Lynch confesses. When I saw the factories in Łódź, I almost fainted, they were so beautiful. And the heat and the power…
That was the beginning of everything.
From time to time (thoughtfully, preferably at the start of a weekend) it’s worth getting up on a ladder
It doesn’t have to be wooden or ergonomic, as long as it’s sturdy, leans against the edge of the frame ... more
It doesn’t have to be wooden or ergonomic, as long as it’s sturdy, leans against the edge of the frame and leads somewhere higher, whatever that means. Of course, a ladder comes in very handy when we are just talking on the phone and our conversation is with someone, or something at a distance and promises to be exceptionally long. Abstractions formed on the ladder cannot be verified, ideas „talked about” on the ladder cannot be embodied – they remain interesting delusion. Delusions are very much needed by Homo sapiens as a natural habitat through which our species maintains its superiority over other primates.
Even more than for conversation, we need delusions that can be turned into an image, into a possibly simple, intuitively usable object or tool. Of course, both colour and tools can be brought on a ladder. But it might not be that simple. Especially if you want to climb the ladder engraved by Dürer – at the very beginning you have to do some exaggerated bending, crossing highly irregular, useless blocks in order to get your foot on the first rung.
Professor Kazimierz Dąbrowski has aptly described what can happen in the next moment.
„Let us now turn to the question of transcending one’s own mental type. Is such a transcendence even possible? We may think that not only is it possible, but that it is even a necessary developmental imperative, a necessary imperative to transcend psychic one-sidedness. To transcend the limitation of life attitudes. It is a mechanism for authentic understanding with oneself and with others, a basis for interdisciplinary and intra-disciplinary thinking. The uptight guy, the developmental type, which does not have the possibility of transcending, even partially, certain psychic qualities, will act in a schematic, automatic way”.
(quoted in K. Dabrowski, Positive Disintegration, Warsaw 2021, second edition, p. 102).
Don’t be those „uptight guys” and believe, that this is a simple instruction for using the old Dürer ladder. Fine, it is not as clear as the Ikea instructions, but it may be used. Confidence in the author is built by such risky (from a technical point of view) phrases as „We may think…”. We still keep thinking! To compensate, we like to think of ourselves as efficient mechanisms. Such thinking, at least since the mid-19th century, has paved the way for technology and engineering, which are happy to play the role of redeeming force in the global marketplace of unlimited possibilities.
Dabrowski’s use of authéntēs/αὐθέντης (ὁ αὐθέντης – a maker, a creator – one who does something with his own hands (and feet), does it by his own strength and will) and authomatos/αὐτόματοç (spontaneous, unplanned, accidental); Aristotle used this word when he wanted to make a clear distinction between the accidental kind of action and that which happens by free will, as ἀπό τέχνç i. e. according to the rules of the art.
There is no need to go too deeply into a given subject, because then it is very easy to take a nose-dive, from any level. And we want to get out of the news feed efficiently, without too much effort, „automatically”, in order to climb somewhere higher, where (surely, as Plato suggests) it is „clearer” and perhaps „better”.
The old, forgotten meaning of automaticity (automaton) as a random, unpredictable, alien force, opposed to our will and intentions (realised through artistry/art/ars/τέχνη), might serve us well in the face of the widely proclaimed imminent era of AI and machine learning domination.
Instead of falling into sadness and melancholy over such – specialised – predictions, try every day to boldly transcend the ostentatiously irregular. Even the irregular and „illogical”, like the clumsy lump in Dürer’s engraving, climb the slightly paradoxical ladder based on the edge of the frame.
Everything can be clarified, arranged in the next frame, in the moment when your head is already out of the here and now (hic et nunc).
Ladders, bridges, tools, mechanisms that allow us to transcend what limits us can be simple and yet effective. You just have to be willing to climb them with your own strength.
Is it worth it? Does it get scary?
Let us conclude by quoting a sentence from Richard Shusterman’s Aesthetic Experience and the Power of Possession, to lend credence to the usefulness of our efforts: „The atmosphere of a bright sunny day by the sea may produce an experiential mood or a feeling of contentment, but for the aesthetic experience of appreciating the beauty of a seascape bathed in sunlight to occur, it is necessary for the subject to become consciously aware of appreciating that beauty” (Krakow 2023).
Are you ready? Do we start automatically or authentically?
What matters that we are on the ladder!
What matters that with mobilneur.com
Everything is fixed in the collective memory
It is always juicy and green, like the grass on a football pitch. The opening of the new building of ... more
It is always juicy and green, like the grass on a football pitch. The opening of the new building of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw has been going on for a few days now. From the point of view of Łódź, it is time to return to the noble cultural and even sporting “rivalry” between ideas as immanent to both cities as Legia team on the one hand and ŁKS and Widzew football clubs on the other. Łódź does not stand a chance. Well, we wish our colleagues from the capital all the best and look forward to the opening whistle when the several days of celebrations are over.Given the centrality of the country’s financial flows on Poland’s sandy, absorbent soil (not least because of that fatal split in its own identity, Bałuty semper contra Widzew), do you think this is too trivial a view of “high” culture? You’d be wrong: a lot of careful, seriously funded cultural research reveals a surprisingly strong relationship between the elitist, intellectual and talkative, and the egalitarian, emotional and rather quiet.Art museums are a team game, requiring outstanding professionals almost as much as professional kickball. A supposedly slightly ludic, ritualised, predictable spectacle, while in the background, behind the veil of dressing rooms and exhibitions, a serious game of interests, big money, even bigger ambitions, no jokes. Art museums (even modern ones) are a graceful, eye-catching attribute for a favourable image of the City. For some obscure reason, we in Europe still look more warmly, more eagerly, at allegories of cities that play with such museum brilliance in a thoughtful, casual way.
The Warsaw Museum has developed from its origins within the Foksal Gallery Foundation. Similarly, the Foundation was established at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries, derived from the Foksal Gallery. This information is as intriguing as the statistics of corner kicks versus the number of heads. However, for the general public, this may appear uninteresting. For those engaged in the field, such as statisticians and chroniclers of the sport, this information is invaluable. Nevertheless, the crucial aspect is the quality of the performance.
Pictured from left: Kim Gordon (2024), Julian Przyboś, Władysław Strzemiński and Katarzyna Kobro (ca. 1930).
The item is currently in vogue, yet evinces no particular enthusiasm
In an age where technology reigns supreme, the outward expression of disquietude takes the form of subtle, impartial cosmetics on ... more
In an age where technology reigns supreme, the outward expression of disquietude takes the form of subtle, impartial cosmetics on a countenance that exudes indifference.
The two figures depicted in the photograph are united by a number of factors, including bipedalism, age and employment at the same advertising agency.
There is much more to us than meets the eye. At least, we would like to believe that we are more than the sum of our parts. Both they and we have many more similarities than we realise. This is what the optimistic thinkers posit. We need this kind of discourse, we need everyone whose intuition whispers that we will succeed in weaving together and unravelling the complex networks of connections between us, so that our gaze does not become lost in them, so that it reaches other eyes.
Talkativeness
We have lived continuously in a civilisation and culture that has developed harmoniously since at least the beginning of the ... more
We have lived continuously in a civilisation and culture that has developed harmoniously since at least the beginning of the modern era. It is an energetic civilisation, fascinated by the possibilities offered by technology and the pragmatically applied rational gift of categorising and ordering everything it encounters. When we try to confirm such a coherent, simple story in images, things get complicated. Let us try to juxtapose two allegorical images, i.e. images that reveal the essential features of some action. It will not be, for example, the human tendency to talk, to chatter, to communicate. Let us take the ancient allegory of “Talkativeness” from Cesare Ripa’s late 16th century work “Iconologia” (for the first illustrated edition of 1603). Ripa writes of it as follows:
“A young woman with her mouth open, dressed in a garment of shimmering colours;
Her dress is embroidered with figures of cicadas and tongues,
On her head she has a swallow standing in its nest and singing; in her right hand she holds a crow…”. (C. Ripa, Iconology, translated by I. Kania, Krakow 1998, p. 453).
Simple and obvious, isn’t it, as symbolic meaning usually is?
Now let’s look around for a contemporary image suitable for an allegory of talkativeness. Let’s make it the first on the list, everyday, obvious, ubiquitous.
Try to convince an alien who is just studying our civilisation (or its AI) that these two images refer to the same eagerness to engage in communicative behaviour. An eagerness that is common to both the 16th and 21st centuries.
It is our cognitive duty to look carefully at images, at moments of everyday life, because they reveal what contradicts the polite fairy tales of the wise books. Modernity is a time of leaps, of breaks with continuity, of very rapid adaptive change on a level so banal that it has long gone unnoticed. Even by clever crows.
Touch it. Go on, touch it!
Touch comes before the other senses. We, grown-ups, would like to forget this. If only because it makes it easier ... more
Touch comes before the other senses. We, grown-ups, would like to forget this. If only because it makes it easier to live alone, and it is a useful skill. But when we reach back into our memory for what we cannot remember, the hierarchy of immediacy returns to our own appearance in this fairy tale. Without that forgotten touch, there would be no us and our amazing ability to observe every barely perceptible nuance at the edge of the horizon. From this ability we have developed many sophisticated arts and sciences that can bring each new experience closer, classify it, make it clearer. We all work hard to stretch, loosen, widen the horizons that bind us, make the world go round and even, as the optimists (in the West) believe, modernise and improve. When we stop working, there is a moment of uncertainty, the simplest one, literally: a reflex, what to do with the hand? What to touch, without a clear purpose, without conviction, slightly uncertain and yet touching. These are the most private moments, when abstract horizons disappear and everything is what we feel through our skin.
We know many cultural codes that tell of the immediacy of essential human relationships in such a pretentious way, with the childlike naivety of “good poetry”. For example, the story of Unfaithful Thomas, a little out of step with his savvy bandmates – a direct support of what is radically new. There is as yet no iconography to show the extent to which he is fascinated by the possibilities of touch, of stroking all those slick screens that constantly present us with the latest information about the farthest horizons, the deepest cuts, the freshest wounds. Touch, too, has been affected by the invasion of our world by the flood of images and words transmitted non-stop online. Who among you today has not touched a telephone, a terminal, a truism, to stop at just one, the titular letter for the transforming world of technology: the T?
It must be smooth
For some reason, when we talk to each other about the world, its improbabilities and banalities, no matter what culture, ... more
For some reason, when we talk to each other about the world, its improbabilities and banalities, no matter what culture, faith or disbelief we are talking about, we keep circling around the premonition of the idea of a monolith. It is not an idea, at least not clear enough to leave a trace in the historical sediment of time. Rather, it is the involuntary gesture of a hand touching something, wandering over an invisible but perceptibly smooth surface. So smooth that even the imagined touch of it begins to fascinate. The unintelligible ancient Latin word fascinans is still very much alive today. It has found many new functions, proving itself in areas as far apart as technology and intimacy. All of us have been fascinated by something. We can talk for hours (even on the phone) about our fascinations. Then we return to the same places, the same moments. Memory leads us back to our own traces, sometimes surprised to discover them again. We go round in circles, gliding over the surface of the past. After successive turns, we cease to distinguish it from the projections of the future. Our attention is held by a smoothness that becomes more and more perfect after each round. We are a nomadic and narrative species. We mix these qualities, turning them into each other in a hypnotic rhythm that leads us along the smooth again and again. It is amazing. It has to be smooth.
In 1533, the year in which Elizabeth I of the Tudor dynasty was born (it has been in the collection of the National Gallery in London since 1890), one of the most accurately described and analysed old paintings was painted. Every detail so precisely painted by Hans Holbein has been meticulously interpreted. And yet the meaning of the whole remains hidden from us. It is as if the meaning is hidden behind a thick patterned curtain, behind which the figures of self-confident ambassadors accustomed to rule are presented.
The year is 2024, and we know as much as we did five hundred years ago about matters of direct concern to everyone and as universal as life and death.
We are capable of changing the decorations, each successive epoch unravelling another carpet with its own pattern. We move away as much as we come closer to understanding what this procession of similar poses and gestures is all about.
Today you need sand and hands to pour it into sacks
There is no need for symbols. But what are we to do, stuck far from the rushing currents in the ... more
There is no need for symbols.
But what are we to do, stuck far from the rushing currents in the relentless tide of information? So let’s focus on symbols for a moment. They carry more meaning than “the latest information”. The motif of death in water runs from Psalms 69 to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.
“Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep seas swell
And the profit and loss”. (Part IV. Death by Water)
The catastrophic imagination needs neither facts, nor statistics. It is the projection of a soaked, flooded soul. May no facts this time try to throw their two cents to the sad tradition of aquatic motifs unnecessarily.
Psalm 69 speaks of despair, of misery, of grief.
“God, God, save me! I’m in over my head.
Quicksand under me, swamp water over me; I’m going down for the third time (…)”
(Psalms 69, 1-2; Bible, The Message).
What brings destruction, the substance that takes one’s breath away, is water, ordinary water, in a vast, incomprehensible excess. From the tradition of ancient Aristotelianism it was known that the best kind of soul was a dry soul. Ancient culture was saturated with the substantial presence of the elements hostile to man, the fear of fire, of water, of humid air, of the treacherous earth that gave way underfoot. We have become unaccustomed to such images. Two hundred years of technical culture have banished the elements to the fringes of our fears. It has almost liberated us, at least in the cities, from the cycles of nature. Sometimes the elements return.
Antosia and her phone
If all goes well, Chełm will become the first city in the world where children are better with their phones ... more
If all goes well, Chełm will become the first city in the world where children are better with their phones than the phones are with them. Let’s hope this is a growing trend. We need standardised services and objects, but even more we need the courage and ability to individualise the objects around us, to treat such a spontaneous need as something natural. From today’s perspective this may look like “playful fun”, but in a decade or so it has the chance to save us from a terribly boring and anonymous world that is entirely “pragmatically” designed.
Antosia has a good chance of becoming the nucleus and leader of the new artistic avant-garde of the 21st century in her weight (and age) category. If she finds imitators/competitors, there could be an unusual exhibition at the school that will attract media interest. I’m keeping my fingers crossed and thank you for meeting me.
And the sense of colour is not bad either. If such a vertical stripe of pink and blue were pasted into the smooth sky of Chełmoński (or Raphael Malczewski, for example), it would make an interesting and breezy, like before a storm.
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2025 February
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