23/7 – 31/7 2021
Galerie Abstract Project | Paris | France
This exhibition presents the work of Mark Starel (aka prof. Wiesław Łuczaj), an intermedia artist whose practice unfolds across painting, spatial organization, digital graphics and generative art. At the core of his research lies a radical premise: contemporary reality is a statistical reality. From this assumption emerges a body of work that transforms databases, quantitative reports and patterns of social behavior — particularly those concerning Polish society — into visual structures governed by numerical logic.
Starel’s so-called “statistical images” are not illustrations of data but translations of it into geometric systems. Numbers become modules, proportions dictate chromatic intervals, and social tendencies crystallize into grids, sequences and algorithmic distributions. Colour and form are subordinated to informational frameworks, yet the resulting works avoid cold detachment. Instead, they reveal the latent aesthetics embedded within statistical order, exposing how measurement itself can generate visual rhythm and spatial tension.
As author of the Statistical Art Manifesto, first formulated in the early 2000s, Starel articulates a position in which art does not merely interpret reality but structurally mirrors its data-driven condition. His practice acknowledges the pervasive role of quantification in economics, politics and digital culture, and repositions geometric abstraction within this expanded epistemological field. Geometry, in his work, is neither decorative nor purely formal; it operates as a cognitive tool.
Since 2011, he has extended this inquiry through the international movement Discursive Geometry, of which he is the originator. This platform situates geometric art within broader contemporary discourses — social, linguistic, scientific and self-reflexively artistic — proposing that abstraction remains critically relevant when it engages with systems of knowledge. Under this framework, exhibitions function as laboratories of exchange, where artists from diverse countries explore how geometry can respond to algorithmic culture, urban structures, language systems or technological mediation.
His parallel activity as curator and academic reinforces this conceptual ecosystem. Through numerous exhibitions and international conferences — including the ongoing series Discursive Geometry dedicated to themes such as landscape, architecture, algorithm or reconstruction — Starel constructs a networked field in which theory and practice continuously inform one another. Even large-scale collective manifestations such as COVIMETRY demonstrate how global crises and statistical monitoring can be reinterpreted through geometric visual language.
In this context, the works presented do not stand as isolated artefacts but as propositions within a broader theoretical architecture. They invite viewers to reconsider abstraction not as an autonomous aesthetic domain, but as a disciplined method for visualizing the structures that govern contemporary life. By converting statistical realities into perceptible form, Starel reveals the hidden geometries of collective behavior and affirms that, in the age of data, geometry remains a powerful instrument of critical awareness.