Tycjan Knut: Interstitium

There are moments in an artist’s practice when development no longer occurs through colour, gesture or composition alone, but through a reconsideration of the conditions that define the medium itself. For Tycjan Knut, this moment arrives with Interstitium, a new body of work that introduces custom-shaped supports and physical openings into a practice long recognised for its subtle investigations of perception, geometry and pictorial space.

Rather than marking a rupture, Interstitium extends a language that has evolved over more than two decades. Knut’s paintings have consistently occupied the threshold between structure and intuition, where calibrated gradients, optical shadows and measured compositional shifts create an unstable equilibrium between surface and depth. The rectangle, however, remained constant. In this new series, it becomes the final convention to be questioned.

“My recent paintings for several years were built around gradients, the illusion of shadow and depth, free-flowing paint and structure. After eight or nine exhibitions I realised something was missing. The rectangle itself had become the final limitation of the language.”
— Tycjan Knut

The title derives from the Latin interstitium, referring to an interval or the space between. It is within this interval that the new works unfold. The opening is not conceived as absence, nor as an act of negation, but as a compositional event. Architecture enters the painting, while the painting simultaneously projects itself into architectural space. Figure and ground, illusion and material fact, painted depth and physical depth begin to coexist within a single visual system.

This development emerges from Knut’s longstanding engagement with the history of Central and Eastern European abstraction. Throughout his practice, he has returned repeatedly to the experimental languages of the 1960s and 1970s, particularly Polish formalism. Among the artists he identifies as central are Jan Berdyszak, Mieczysław Wiśniewski and Wojciech Fangor, whose investigations into geometry, optical perception and the limits of the pictorial field continue to resonate within his own work. These references are neither quotations nor stylistic models, but part of a historical lineage through which Knut has continuously examined the possibilities of abstraction.

“When I feel something is missing, I go back to the art of the 1960s and 1970s. My main circle of references has always been artists like Jan Berdyszak, Mieczysław Wiśniewski and Wojciech Fangor. They showed that painting doesn’t have to remain confined within the rectangle.”
— Tycjan Knut

Italian Spatialism inevitably forms part of this conversation. Lucio Fontana’s Concetti spaziali fundamentally transformed the relationship between painting and actual space by opening the surface itself. Yet Knut’s position remains distinct. Where Fontana’s gesture challenged the ontology of painting through incision, Interstitium incorporates the opening into an already established painterly vocabulary of gradients, proportion and perceptual instability. The cut is not the subject of the work; it becomes another instrument within painting itself.  

The physical structure of the support now precedes the act of painting. Each composition begins with drawings for a carpenter rather than the brush itself. Custom-shaped canvases are conceived before pigment is applied, allowing the construction of the support to become inseparable from the pictorial composition.

“The process now starts before I even touch the canvas. I begin by sketching projects for the carpenter. The cut-outs become part of the composition itself, and only afterwards do the gradients, shadows and colour begin to respond to that structure.”
— Tycjan Knut

Painting follows construction. Gradients move across interrupted planes. Shadows suggest depth beside openings that possess actual depth. The absence of material performs the same compositional function previously achieved only through illusion. Figure and ground are no longer separated exclusively through colour; they are physically recalibrated.

“The actual form became the natural expansion of the language. It added another dimension, another module, another field through which I can continue working intuitively.”
— Tycjan Knut

Despite these structural interventions, painting remains the central concern. Interstitium does not move toward sculpture or architecture, but expands painting from within. The opening intensifies an investigation that has always been present: the unstable relationship between surface and space, between perception and materiality.

As Knut remarked during a recent interview:

“The fold is simply another way of articulating the boundary between figure and ground. It extends the internal logic of the painting rather than moving into another discipline.”

This statement clarifies the ambition of the series. The opening does not announce the end of painting. It introduces another compositional vocabulary through which painting continues to evolve.

Presented by Buysse Gallery, Interstitium marks a significant development within Tycjan Knut’s practice. The series demonstrates how contemporary abstraction can remain deeply rooted in the histories of European painting while generating new formal possibilities. It affirms painting not as a closed medium, but as one capable of continually redefining its own conditions.

“Eventually the language will condense. It will become more precise, more distilled. Perhaps that is when it truly becomes a signature — when complexity is reduced to its most essential gestures.”
— Tycjan Knut

In Interstitium, the rectangle ceases to be a given. The support itself becomes an active participant in the construction of pictorial space, opening a new chapter in Knut’s ongoing exploration of abstraction, perception and material intelligence.