Zielinski’s topic of machines in, Devices Opening Up, include: laptops, phones, scanners, paper shredders and camcorders. Painting machines used for daily communication, Zielinski reminds us that painting is also a form of communication. Aside from the display unit of the panel, Zielinski’s forms purposefully have no straight lines or perfect angles. This is at odds with conventional device aesthetics. These untrue angles and skewed proportions in Zielinski’s exaggerated machines contribute to the comedy that speaks to how machines’ appearances change, but functionality remains constant.
The bright colors are both happy and harsh provoking strange, unsettling and engaging paradoxes: what is “new”? These colors insist on advertising and issues of desire. Recently, people increasingly interface life through mediated technological devices. Zielinski reverses this by painting what seems deceptively flat from a distance, but up close is high relief and reaches out from the device to the viewer, beckoning our interfacing with painting. Each work is a single event, thus a unique personality.
Zielinski uses new advances (seasonally and locally) in acrylic paints: modelling paste, gels and interference colour to update painting just as electronics utilize newer plastics, polymers and coloration. These new acrylics shout to our plastic age. The background waves and auras make Wi-Fi, radio waves and heat dissipation statically visible.
Zielinski’s paintings evoke still life, portrait and icon painting genres but do not sit squarely in any particular category. This mirrors our contemporary, multiply-functioning, technological performance. Is a camera is a phone or is the phone a camera, or a camcorder or is it a digital photograph album? Recently this portal with the internet make our ideas, images and films visible to all. In essence he questions the accepted nomenclature, its breakdown and its exacerbation. Working under the assumption of the timelessness of Art, Zielinski creates paintings that speak to the past, present and future, while trying to escape the expectations of timeliness.

Courtesy of Motus Fort