Finding Faces in Crumpled Paper
By MR.SOAPSKI
There is a painting called Coronation (2026) in which a woman with half-closed eyes sits submerged to the waist in water, surrounded by figures who appear to be celebrating something she finds entirely unremarkable. From her hand, a ring drops toward the surface. It spirals, MR.SOAPSKI explained, the way a ring actually would — turning on its own weight as it sinks. He drew it in light first, capping it with shadow afterward to make it sit in space. The whole scene came from a crumpled piece of fabric photographed under controlled light. The canvas was originally planned as a horizontal composition; he switched it to vertical mid-process because the horizontal arrangement left too much empty space, the figures failing to cohere around the central woman. Every painting, he said, goes through that test.
MR.SOAPSKI is a Polish painter based in Bydgoszcz, 45 years old, self-taught, with close to three decades of professional practice behind him. His current body of work, PAPER CUTZ, is built on a single procedural constraint: he does not begin with a subject. He begins with material — crumpled paper, folded cloth, discarded fabric — and photographs it under shifting light until faces appear in the folds. Then he paints what he found.
The process sounds simple. It is not. The first step happens on an iPad, in Procreate, where he works through the photographs in what he called a kind of freestyle, scanning the light-and-shadow patterns for the architecture of a face. "Light and shadow tell me where I can find the eyes, the nose," he said. "And from there I build the whole story around it." Once a composition reaches roughly ninety to ninety-five percent of its final form digitally, he transfers it to canvas — large-scale, mixed media, combining acrylic, oil, and spray paint on textured surfaces. The canvas is where the remaining percentage gets resolved, sometimes by addition, rarely by removal.
He is precise about the sequence of looking. He starts with the eyes, or rather with the place where eyes could plausibly go — a shadow pocket, a ridge of folded material that catches light at the right angle. From that anchor point, the rest of the face follows. He described how, once a first face locks in, others tend to emerge nearby: a second figure appears, then a third, and he begins connecting them into a scene. He will also combine photographs of several different crumpled sheets, overlaying them digitally until the figures hidden across multiple sources can be drawn into a single composition. In Coronation, the surrounding figures came gradually, long after the central woman was established. He built outward from her, deciding she would sit half-submerged, that her expression would carry a quality he described as royal indifference — the look of someone for whom public ceremony is simply the texture of ordinary life.
The ring dropping from her hand carries what he called a double meaning. It signals the coronation itself — a ring as emblem of authority — and simultaneously signals detachment from it, the gesture of someone releasing something they never needed. He said he had observed that quality in certain public figures, people for whom status arrived so early and completely that it stopped registering as anything remarkable. The figures surrounding the woman are glad for her. She is elsewhere.
The faces that emerge from crumpled material tend toward the grotesque, he acknowledged — slightly caricatured, not quite human. He keeps them that way. The eyes in his paintings are rarely anatomically correct; more often they are neon lines, marks that carry the graphic signature of graffiti culture rather than the conventions of portraiture. That grounding is deliberate. MR.SOAPSKI came up through the Polish skateboarding and graffiti scene of the 1990s — he was a skater himself — and that world, its visual language, its social codes, its particular cast of characters, remains the frame through which he organises what he finds in folded cloth. Titles like Stick-Up Kids (2025), All Eyez on Me (2025), and Freestyle Battle are not decorative; they are references that carry specific weight for anyone who spent time in that environment. He described the 1990s scene as a place where you could meet genuinely interesting people and find yourself in genuinely unusual situations, and both the people and the situations feed directly into the figures he extracts from crumpled paper.
His first recorded solo exhibition was in Bournemouth in 2012 — a significant early step for a self-taught painter working from Bydgoszcz. A second solo followed in his home city in 2016. In between, he showed in London at the Westbank Gallery as part of the group exhibition Four Elements in 2014, a show that placed him alongside other contemporary painters working at the intersection of street culture and fine art. He said those early exhibitions confirmed for him that the procedural logic of PAPER CUTZ — discovery over invention — was a genuinely distinct approach; he had not encountered another artist working from the same starting point. His work has since appeared in Vogue Italia, Hi-Fructose, and Huck, among others, and is held in private collections across Europe.
He has been moving, slowly, toward horizontal formats. Most of his work has been vertical — a format that simply suited him better for years. But a new collection, which he is calling Horizontal Maneuvers, now runs to six works, and he described the shift as crossing a barrier he had not been able to cross before. The wider frame lets him build scenes rather than portraits. In Freestyle Battle, one of the horizontal works, he extracted figures from photographs of crumpled clothing: one figure on horseback, another in the foreground wearing what reads as a sixteenth-century inquisitor's helmet, others emerging from the surrounding folds. The palette runs through multiple greens — neon, bottle green, a dark muted tone he described as rotten — and he said the contrast between those tones is what holds the image together. Remove any one of them, he said, and there would simply be empty space. He named Freestyle Battle and a second horizontal work, Knight Riders, as the two pieces currently pulling hardest at him from the backlog.
That backlog is substantial. He has approximately fifty digital compositions waiting to be transferred to canvas. Four canvases exist so far. The gap is not a source of anxiety but a resource. When the energy to work accumulates — and he described that accumulation as something he can partly induce, by sitting quietly with the iPad and letting photographs suggest things — he tends to move fast, one idea feeding the next across several consecutive days. Then he stops and lets the reservoir refill. He said the most recent projects in the queue are the ones pulling hardest, because each new batch of digital work represents a barrier cleared, a level of visual problem-solving that earlier work had not yet reached.
The question of authorship runs through his written statement and came up obliquely in conversation too. If the image already exists in the material before he sees it, who made it? He does not answer this directly, and the interesting thing is that he keeps asking it. What he does say is that his role is one of recognition rather than invention — that the discipline built over thirty years is a discipline of attention, training himself to see what was already there. The spray can, for its part, occasionally resists: layers applied too quickly can bleed into one another, though he said his experience means this almost never happens anymore. When it does, it is the spray that causes it.
He works in the evenings, sets things down when tired, comes back the next day or the day after with fresh eyes. Sometimes he catches something new in a second look and adjusts. When the feeling arrives that the work has reached its peak — he used the Polish word petarda, roughly meaning it's a banger — he stops. "There's no point," he said, "because that's already the height of the achieved goal."
Coronation was still at the digital stage when we spoke. He was candid that something might still change in translation to canvas — the eye catches things at scale that the screen conceals. What will not change, he said, is the ring: already sinking, already spiraling on its own weight, already gone from her hand before the ceremony is finished.
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