Magazyn MSN

 

Some time ago, when writing a recollective impression about the sculptor Henryk Wiciński, I allowed myself the following poetic image: occasionally, when faced with two images colliding in a painting, I discover within them an impact of two planets, the calamity’s booming roar nearly audible. This memory of a poetic comparison I had penned long ago ties in closely with the fact that the matter of writing about painting inevitably demands the choice of a writing genre possibly close to the image, i.e. one influencing our intellectual imagination in ways affording reasonable proximity to the concept of the painting at hand, since full transposition of a painterly concept into another language is impossible. The different quality of measures applied in each genre of art determines its existence as well as its “uniqueness”, in that it remains a phenomenon as inimitable as it is untranslatable. Terminology does evolve along the winding path of art, arising from the need to provide a general definition for each new artistic phenomenon. Yet these are terms describing directions or concepts only – whereas we do have the desire to read every painting.

 

A painter’s work is part of his or her speech. No word, whether spoken or written, is capable of expressing it – painting exists only through its exclusivity. Each artistic genre has its own array of matter and means which define it. We try and refer to painting through words – speech has become the most universal channel of interpersonal communication; that said, whenever our thoughts form sentences, we observe a process of creating a structure that turns into poetry, literature, philosophy, history, an academic or methodological treatise regarding a particular painting. The structure offers an illusion of coming close to it. Our imagination kicks in, shifting to the intellectual plane and using it in an attempt to reach the painting’s inner world. It is easier to coexist with a thing already widely discussed. While approaching a painting with a poetic metaphor is the easiest thing of all, the poetry will be image-specific. Terminology evolving along the winding path or art and allowing notions closer to art to evolve is the most difficult and useful thing of all – it is a new language, a visual lexicon, so to say. Coming up with the phrase l’espace nouveau for Mondrian’s visual concept, while not summing it up in any way, affords an option to begin contemplating it.

The intellectual dance critics perform over art publicizes it (making viewers think). We may occasionally draw near to art by developing new terminology, a new glossary for a new idea. Another logic of abstract art. Like planets dormant on walls, paintings explode in contact with content of the human psyche, an outcome of transformation we – unfamiliar with the phenomenon – may end up referring to as chemical: explosions of feelings.

 

[…] turning into an eye, when the whole body turns into one huge eye while never ceasing to be all senses at once and each sense separately.

 

I have seen [a] Picasso in person. Picasso, experimenting. Concession. Reflex. Emotion. In modern art, this is no experiment! To them, this is not an experiment. Did emotion precede calculation of the object? Nobody can tell. One seamlessly becomes the other. I will not describe my peregrination of Parisian museums, I am no good at it, Ważyk has done it already in the most untruthful painting-to-literature transposition. […] Our Marxist writers find translating paintings into literature all too easy!

 

I do not want to describe, descriptions are always false, they never let essential things surface; offering a sense of ambience for people to sense is much more important.

 

We have a propensity for behaving like the quintessential clueless – we keep resolving matters of principle. Everything has to be substantive until the substantiveness of it all makes you cry, since we are still stuck at square one of what is fundamental. And we never take one step further. I prefer to think (or pretend) that this is obvious to everyone – in a country whose artists were constantly travelling beyond its borders, staying beyond these (currently) unfortunate borders for years and years, seeking education and focusing on matters of art outside “the substantive and the fundamental”, enjoying the ambience without losing tempo, the latter unheard of in Poland. Truth be told, no artist of ours has ever had meaningful results without having taken a deep breath in the artworld’s capital.

 

The Renaissance was created by Italian painters rather than Italian aristocracy. Any requirements were set by the snobs who had spent a lot of time focusing on art, by highly educated individuals.

 

Had painting been a form of art juggling topics depending on social circumstances – had it been merely representative, in other words – it would have been unbearable. Following the history of painting, we find that things have been going differently, that development has been a real thing; we can see that there is no such thing as bourgeois art. In other words, art is as class-oriented as the appropriateness identified therein by a specific social class and its skill in producing it – which results in the narrowing of human thought evolution.

We are very much aware of the number of artists who have profited from upward social mobility, immediately becoming part of the class represented by their well- or decently-born acquaintances.

 

We consider culture to be universally human, otherwise we would have to exclude certain classes therefrom. We are aware that by oscillating, it is conducive to development. Authorities are responsible for popularizing art; yet they have no say as to creating it – this is only up to the artist.

 

However brainwashed with socialist realism, the young people of Poland have been flourishing, bold and vibrant, adopting suggestions of contemporaneity. And yet a few brief years ago it seemed that repairing socialist realism-caused damage would take ages.

 

[It is] the artist’s responsibility to purposely develop personal sensitivity, imagination and awareness. [The artist] is not limited to four senses in exploring the world.

 

Man will lose courage under hopeless circumstances only. I am afraid we have come very close to such hopelessness. We have no tricks up the sleeve to play on viewers who would then pay for our efforts, captivated by our persistence. Things are actually a hundred times worse: our society is suffering of a shortage of a highly educated class with living standards allowing them time and energy to enjoy art, letting them be snobs: by no means a pejorative term, snobbery is any modern civilization’s primary driving force behind introducing the average citizen to art, such exposure ultimately leading to connoisseurship. Even if it were possible for our country to breed an artistic concept surpassing any other in the whole world, nobody would even notice, or be capable of discovering it.

We have been taught to mock snobbery – whereas it may be the primary driving force behind the first step towards art for a person unfamiliar with it. Civilization has destroyed the wholesomeness of sensitivity, the biological reception of art.

Art is merely an ersatz in times when life lacks beauty, the effect gradually diminishing as equilibrium is restored. Art is of major importance today owing to its simple existence, autonomous of any personal concept. The future is art.

Art is a truly difficult matter, as proven by aesthetic errors and discoveries exposed years later – most often thanks to some discovery buff.

 

Art cannot be planned or predicted; new thought is inevitably something of an astonishment. Art is born. Each new painting comes as a surprise to the artist. Art cannot be planned for another reason: it is elusive. To an artist, any work as yet unpainted remains an unknown, affected by the concept, by matter, by chance. Lying in wait, the aforesaid surprise becomes a flywheel of art creation.

Art requires a double time mode: firstly, it takes time for art to come into existence; secondly, discovery of the phenomenon is a lengthy process, occasionally spanning a century. Today – as our heightened awareness and the dynamic of change keep cutting time short – all politicians ought to do is leave art well alone, and let it live.

 

I think that being free is the most difficult thing of all – free of superstition and convention and anything letting humans exist in some kind of a “safe” format, without much effort. Yet with freedom comes responsibility!

Freedom is the fundamental discovery of contemporary painting – not selflessness or imagination or originality at any cost, as people are wont to say, but the artist’s unreserved right to reach his or her ultimate boundaries. To any human being, the personal “self” is the theme most prone to doubt and least accessible in equal measure.

 

Art is born of free thought; it seems we can openly declare that genius is the greatest freedom of thought in confrontation with the world – freedom is restricted by definition, predefined by life, the past and the present; it takes the power of genius to escape such bonds.

 

Translated by Aleksandra Sobczak-Kovesi.