Introduction

Black tea is said to brighten thoughts, especially on a long, sleepless night. Tomek Kręcicki’s monu- mental mug fills the gallery as part of the latest exhibition presented at Rhetoric. Labels of tea bags protrude from the overscaled vessel, but instead of manufacturer logos, they offer us a set of painterly works - lapidary representations of objects and situations that make up a pre-sleep ritual: sleeping pills, earplugs, water drops dripping over the sink. The twists and turns lull us into an evening aura of anticipation for a well-deserved rest. However, after the daily stimuli, work, exposure to the blue light

of screens, sleep does not want to come, and time begins to play tricks on us.

Time is active, it has such properties as verbs, Thomas Mann claimed. However, while waiting for sleep to come, time loses its power to be active and bring change, it turns into a dragging glue to which shreds of thoughts attach, piling on top of each other and losing any clear meaning. Insomnia exagger- ates insignificant problems that swell with its passing, and the swelling boil of intrusive thoughts does not allow soothing rest.

The objects in the paintings-labels fall - a drop of water falls, pills fly out of the silverware. It happens that we, too, being on the border between sleep and java, fall - induced by a muscular contraction, called a myclonic spurt, the sensation of falling awakens us and condemns us to try again to detach ourselves from the tiring reality. Maybe it’s the moment when we get up and, despite the chill we feel, go to the kitchen to brew another mug of tea. In order to squeeze the strongest possible essence out of the brew, we add more tea bags and wait for the drink to acquire a suitably saturated color.