"Paweł Książek’s Plates is a series of works which allude to the illustrative-cum-informational plates used in encyclopaedias, dictionaries and the natural history textbooks that became popular in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as incontrovertible compendiums of knowledge. They employ the same system for numbering the explanations, ‘Fig.’ plus a number and, in addition, they present juxtapositions of images with factual material and scholarly, monographic texts. They are intended to bring out surprising and revealing connections not only between individual events, works of art and the biographies of artists, filmmakers and musicians, but also in a wider aspect, between, scholarship, biology, philosophy and anthropology and, at the formal level, between the shapes, colours and lines of sketches and scores. They are a vivid record of fleeting thoughts and notes based on quotations from scholarly studies. They reveal a particular model for interpreting selected cultural texts, a model which is grounded in the principles of assembling images, visualising selected quotes and noting individual, subjective analyses in one place. They constitute a specific collection and montage of fragments, autonomic, yet coherent, expressed in the form of connections between language and images, scholarship and art, intellect and intuition. Here, the interpretation of historical and scholarly material emerges on the basis of endeavours to develop a common language for presenting the facts through the determining rigour of historiography, as well as intuition and artistic imagination. In truth, it is an endeavour to create a compendium of alternative knowledge emerging in the sphere of visualised, intuitive connections supported by sources derived from available scholarly publications. ... "