BLOK (2020-ONGOING)

It all began with play. In 2020 I started reframing the surplus time locked inside as an opportunity, I began designing a video game —a medium I’d adored since childhood. Unbeknownst to me, the project would evolve through iterations, mirroring my own changes, until its 2025 prototype debut (see Dark Wood chapter). Drawing from quarantine, I used the limitations of the game engine to transpose anxious inner landscapes into pixel-art. Yet quickly I found this jagged visual language to be able to express an inner turmoil which had been brewing inside me. Between the virtual and physical realms came Blok. Blok is a block, a (mental) blockade, a square, a pixel, a grid, a Soviet-era concrete apartment building: prefabricated, replicable, monolithic, perfect in its simplicity, its utility. I grew up in one—a Khrushchevka—its brutalist, neverending rows left an impression on my psyche. Even after migrating to the Netherlands at ten, Blok haunts my dreams –a structure I once inhabited now inhabits me. It is both physical and psychic: a metaphor for binaries— on/off, true/false, control/surrender— the tyranny of 0s and 1s. Leaving no room for paradox. While working with the digital medium, I sensed my neuroses surfacing. Instead of suppressing it, I gave it a voice and started investigating it in my painting. Drawn by my fetish for the computer’s ‘rationality’, I introduced further restrictions into my painting: one flat brush, ivory black and titanium white. Canvas dimensions divided by brush width became my “resolution”—clearly defining when a work achieves finishedness. Blok emerged as an attempt to express the wandering thoughts that arose during the pandemic. Anxious dreams and half‑forgotten memories stored in low resolution, each scene hovering on the edge of figuration. Painted by hand on surfaces ranging from small canvases to large murals, these bloks enforced precision and stifled spontaneity. Yet even within that self‑imposed rigidity, mistakes slipped through: crooked lines, blotches, splashes— spaces where the “failings” revealed the human behind the process, where the unspeakable whispered. Investigating the fractality of reality— first revealed to me through psychedelic experiences —I began to examine the seemingly watertight systems I unconsciously accepted as reality. I focused on their smallest components, their microcosmic building-bloks, only to discover their uncanny reflections in the world at large. Martin Heidegger (1962) noted that when a tool functions smoothly, it fades into the background, becoming an extension of ourselves. Only when it breaks or no longer works as expected does it re-emerge, reminding us of its status as one of many possible ways to shape the world. I began thinking about this in terms of mental imagery: what would an extreme close-up of a thought look like? My mind, shaped by a youth saturated with digital media, instinctively imagined pixels— those ubiquitous units of digital representation. It is as though I learned to perceive the world through the filter of a grid. Yet these convenient bloks that form a believable structure of perception begin to collapse when they reveal their underlying function: the compression of the infinite into the digestible. Language. My fascination with compression led me further in painting. Beginning with binary black‑and‑white bloks, I later scaled up to introduce gray areas in the Kompresor sub‑series, shifting from the painted “blok” to the airbrushed “macroblok” In parallel, I harvested online profile pictures and rendered them into the We Are Data portrait paintings—each face reduced to a handful of data, an exercise in my ongoing obsession with finishedness, indulging my compulsive need to probe the boundaries of representation, in search of an algorithm, a logical definition of the ineffable being [1]. And yet, slowly I started to rediscover a childlike playfulness. With every crooked edge and unplanned drip, I learned that art is an unfinished theory—always between “newness” and “not yet complete,” never tidy or final (Adriaanse & Eno, 2025). Slowly allowing myself to let go. Art— and identity— are processes. Though deeply personal, Blok also resonates with broader existential reductionism, the microcosm reflecting the macrocosm (and vice-versa). Campagna’s critique of modernity’s Technic as a “metaphysics of measurability” captures the system I both inhabited and sought to rupture—one that reduces meaning to metrics and denies mystery. Mirroring Technic’s imposition on nature—straight lines plowed through chaos, reality compartmentalized into grids. These grids, Campagna argues, create a “map without an outside,” denying the ineffable (Campagna, 2018). In Blok, I started a conversation with a part of me I had long sought to suppress, externalizing it in my practice. In alchemical terms, this was my nigredo—the blackening stage where the shadow is first confronted (Jung, 1963). As William S. Burroughs declared, “Smash the control images. Smash the control machine” (1970, p. 74). In Blok, my own personal control machine, that impulse took a quieter form: not smashing, but studying it, rendering it—methodically, obsessively—until the system itself became observable. The grid became a mirror, revealing the hidden logics that shaped me. And in confronting them, even without final resolution, disruption occurred.

“Icon 1”, 20x20cm, acrylic on canvas. Presented in De Tunnel / Nijverheid, own
documentation, 2024.

[1] At the time, I was preoccupied with the notion of ruins—specifically the idea of post-digital ruins as embodying a liminal
moment just before a metaphysical collapse, where themes of permanence and decay intersect. Later forming the core of my BA thesis (Stojanowicz, 2023), these concerns ledme to experiment further: engraving the We Are Data portraits into stone and burying them,
and then developing Archivist 1.0, an interactive installation in which a camera mounted on a robotic arm scans its surroundings for faces, captures and displays them on screen, and then prints them in real time onto a 300-meter scroll of paper via a dot-matrix printer—before depositing the scroll directly into an archive cabinet as
part of the assemblage. For the sake of brevity and relevance, this strand of work is not discussed further in this paper.

References:

Adriaanse, B., & Eno, B. (2025). What Art Does: An Unfinished Theory. Faber & Faber.

Burroughs, W. S. (1970). The Soft Machine. Calder Publications Ltd.

Campagna, F. (2018). Technic and Magic: The Reconstruction of Reality. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and Time. Blackwell.

Stojanowicz, M. (2023). (IM)PERMANENT; how can liminality be visualised through post-digital ruins? 2.0. (Unpublished BA thesis, available in an institutional repository of Hogeschool Rotterdam).