HYBRIS: MARCO ŻEBROWSKI
Hybris names the moment of ascent when elevation begins to lose ground. It describes a quiet intoxication with “more,” a state of lightness in which orientation thins. In Marco Żebrowski’s work, hybris is not a distant warning but a lived condition.
The painting centers on a charged form: a circle positioned in the upper left quarter, paired with a vertical stripe falling downward. Within Żebrowski’s practice, circles recur as layered traces, each one partially covered by the next, never fully closed. Here, the circle remains intact. It stands apart as a singular moment of completion, clarity, or fixation.
The image recalls the myth of Icarus, not at the point of impact, but at the threshold where ascent turns into descent. It captures the instant when striving overtakes grounding, when closeness to the sun begins to undo the wings that carried the body out of the labyrinth. The nearer the summit, the greater the exposure, and the more severe the fall once balance slips. What follows is not a physical wandering, but a mental one: a state in which a goal seems clear, while orientation fades. This movement is not wrong, but it reveals how easily connection is lost when desire becomes more important than measure.
Embedded within a handcrafted wooden structure, the painting extends into its surroundings. The carved walls evoke bark, situating the work within a forest-like space. The pine panels are first read through their grain, their composition assembled through observation before being opened by carving and burning. What emerges is not imposed but uncovered, layer by layer, as if the image already existed beneath the surface. In this logic of removal and revelation, falling is not failure. In the forest, collapse becomes holding, decay becomes nourishment, and growth unfolds through proximity rather than dominance, held by time, material, and what is allowed to surface. Materiality remains open and exposed. Painting and wood form a single body, tension and support held together. The untreated pine frame will age, grey, and shift over time, allowing change to become part of the work rather than something resisted.
Hybris frames ambition as a motion that detaches. Against ascent, the work sets measure and relation. What endures is not height, but what holds over time.
