Street Lights - Purple, 2025

Adam Wajerczyk  

A metropolitan street captured in broad daylight, under the white, damp light that follows a downpour. Unlike the nocturnal versions in the series, this canvas plays on brightness — and on violet.

The composition adopts a classic frontal perspective: two rows of buildings close in on either side to lead the eye towards a background of brilliant white sky, almost overexposed, which seems to erase the city as it recedes. This opening of light at the centre acts as a visual magnet: everything converges there, everything dissolves there. In the midst of that brightness, a building stands out in fine horizontal lines — the only truly drawn architecture in the painting.

The side façades, for their part, are treated as broad vertical masses of mauve, lilac, plum and grey-green, applied with the knife in descending bands. They describe nothing precisely — no window, no cornice — but establish depth and rhythm. A few awnings and signs announce themselves through oblique yellow and white lines that structure the space like geometric markers.

Traffic occupies the middle of the painting. A dark SUV in the foreground, a line of vehicles dwindling towards the background, a white bus on the right: the forms are laid down in a few confident strokes, without detail, yet the diminishing scale is enough to create depth and movement.

The wet ground is the painter's true playing field. The asphalt reflects everything in long vertical runs: the golds of shop windows and lights, the mauves of the façades, the magenta and blue touches of the signs descend in liquid trails across the lower half of the canvas. Painted in bold gestures, these reflections do not seek optical illusion — they assert the paint for its own sake.

The palette here is dominated by a rare and assertive range: violet in all its shades, from pale lilac to deep plum, set against saturated golden yellows and a few flashes of vivid pink and blue. This tension between cools and warms gives the whole a vibrant, almost unreal luminosity.

From a distance, the scene is perfectly legible: a street, cars, a shower that has just stopped. Up close, everything comes apart into a field of abstract strokes, scrapings and impasto where the canvas remains visible. It is in that gap that the whole of Adam Wajerczyk's painting resides: the city is not described, it is felt.