Museum of Stanisław Noakowski, Nieszawa, Poland, Returns - internal landscape - exhibition of painting

RETURNS – INTERNAL LANDSCAPE

It seems striking that language – while constantly evolving and intimidating in its richness – is a relatively inaccurate tool when it comes to expressing emotional states. Aimed at narration, cause-and-effect relationships and Darwinistic practicality, it forces anyone attempting to verbalize (down to the slightest detail) the colour of personal exaltation to seek refuge in the infinite world of metaphors and comparisons. The matter is further complicated by the fact that dictionaries are fraught with pitfalls of elementary concepts whose implied meaning evokes among the audience connotations with disparate experiences.

In the light of these considerations, the use of the word returns in the title of Jacek Świgulski’s exhibition appears to be a deliberate decision signalling an invitation for the spectators to embark on a contemplative journey through the outskirts of their own memories. The offer has taken on a peculiar but surprisingly effective form because the impulse to conduct the self-analysis is in this case landscape painting – a genre commonly associated with skin-deep impressions – redefined by Świgulski’s hand and treated as a medium for universal symbols.

While discussing the scenery in Świgulski’s paintings, it is impossible not to refer to them as separate landscapes. Created in spaces unspoiled by civilization they rarely confront the audience with images of nature per se, hinting instead at the inspiration behind each work only through their figurative details and titles. For the artist, the experience of contact with nature is a starting point, a medium stripped of the egocentric connotations by the human creator to provide a space for bold experiments at the interface of composition and colour theory. On Świgulski’s canvas, bucolic landscapes transform into tumultuous arenas where shapes and colours struggle for dominance while powerful brushstrokes and pronounced textures suggest that their author perceives nature primarily as an element: wild, untamed and dangerous. In most pieces, earth dominates the space superseding the sky as if annexing heaven and ordering its dwellers to abandon their dreams of sacrum. However, its weary face is run-down by the endless cycle of birth and death – the surface cracks filled with semi-dried blood are a stark reminder of the perpetual process. A wild bird looming in the distance is unaware of its impending doom, a lost abstract being brought to life only for its innocence to highlight the world’s indifference.

Świgulski does not stop at making his initial diagnosis of the world around us. On the contrary, his model of the environment while reduced to the essential minimum is expanded by the addition of the author’s commentary, a clearly outlined human mark on the hostile virgin territory. With his analytical eye, he scrutinizes the existing space, fixing his gaze on every object, every contour, every intersection of lines capable of giving him a thrill laced with melancholy. It is an expression of a tribute to nature and a readiness to reconcile with it – perpetuated in the most human way possible as it is dictated by the artist’s emotional perception. It also manifests a longing for snapshots from the past (which somewhat explains the dehumanized atmosphere of the paintings reducing humanity to the observer’s “I”) as well as an attempt to spot their reflections in the present. An identical process occurs in the mind of the artist’s audience. The universality which the presented works owe to their contents being anchored firmly between truth and confabulation provokes the spectators to search for crumbs of their own identity in them. The landscape painted by Świgulski is in fact a psychological sketch, a record of fleeting exhilaration built from fragments of the experiences of our ancestors, our descendants as well as our own: the outline of a forest path evoking the memory of childhood trips to the country, a sun-scorched clearing associated with one’s first love, a shady grove symbolizing an urgent need to be at peace and focus on the inner self.

Can the language issues mentioned at the start serve as an argument justifying a sensitive man’s decision to pick up painting? While it remains a question for the artists, there is no doubt that sagacity and inquisitiveness drove Świgulski to spin a tale about the spiritual dimension which is best not distorted with articulated speech.

Krzysztof Badowiec

ATTACHEMENTS:

FOLDER POSTER TEXT - K. Badowiec

Contemporary Art Gallery, CEKUŚ, Nakło Śląskie, Poland, Internal landscape – exhibition of painting

INTERNAL LANDSCAPE

Time has dealt brutally with the hierarchy of painting themes. The order established in the 17th century by the French Royal Academy recognized the historical and religious motifs as the most important (because they were related to the measure of everything – man and his most important achievements). They were followed by the portrait and genre scenes (also due to the references to human figure). The lowest steps of this ladder were occupied by the landscape and still life, because they could not reflect human heroism and propagate higher values. If we move the story forward more than 300 years, it will turn out that the historical and religious subject matter is practically dead, while the landscape and still life are still alive and well. We can indicate many reasons for this state of affairs. However, it seems that in the era of emancipated art, in which individualism is valued and the form is an autonomous substantiation of the work’s existence, the landscape freed from the burden of anecdote – not needing a pretext in the form of a plot and didactics – turns out to be still a vast testing ground for different artistic concepts.

Jacek Świgulski uses this testing ground in his latest cycle “Returns”, testing painting issues that manifest themselves in the confrontation with a rich landscape of the Kraków-Częstochowa Upland and the Bieszczady mountains. In this painting, space is comes to the forefront. Yet, it is not developed in a conventional way. Such space has no respect for Alberti’s perspective – it does not let the lines to join on the horizon and it does not thicken the air at a distance. The artist does not try to trick a viewer in a straightforward manner, projecting the depth on a flat screen of stretcher. It keeps respect for physical properties of the painting substrate, which was once so rightly defined by Maurice Denis. We achieve compositions that are based on a zone system – mutual relationship of successive plan designs and shapes contained within them. The artist does justice to nature as the source of inspiration, finding in it hidden proportions of lines and planes and unnoticed sets of colors. He aims at presenting a raw, intuitive image of nature on the canvas, which is why he brings the landscape extending before his eyes to basic formal elements. In essence, the world is geometrical. Or at least it can be perceived as such. While watching these painting we are waiting for a farming field to become a chessboard, and a mountain range – a cascade of triangles. Świgulski, although obviously attracted to abstraction, does not venture thus far because he is not satisfied with clear-cut solutions. His fuel is not absolute radicalism. It is rather a joy of experimenting which preserves awareness of advantages and limitations of the painting matter.

When painting nature, should we consider what we see or what we know? We known that seeing is a complex process based to the same degree on an optical instrument such as the eye as on the knowledge that determines perception. Privileging one tool means suppressing the other. On the line between these poles, Jacek Świgulski locates nearer to the eye. As an intuitive artist, he chooses impressionality for his guide. He does not allow the excess of information about the surrounding world to blur the clarity of his vision. He rejects components that are obvious and, at the same time, unnecessarily complicate composition – he synthesizes. He neglects buildings, animals, people. He focuses on the rhythm that emerges from the observed fragment of reality – he examines its structure. He emphasizes some shapes – he outlines hills and valleys, extracts outliers that stand out with their whiteness. He allows rivers and trails meander as long as their task is to illustrate some general phenomena – patterns found in nature. On the painting level, planes exist in the service of division.

Simplified canvases leave room for breathing, act on the imagination with their colour. The color tells us about the air temperature; it suggests the time of day and the season. Sometimes the whole story is concluded with a concise brush stroke – a red reflection of the setting sun in a river or a brighter line of the horizon between the dark navy sky and earth. Sometimes we only get a suggestion of a natural fact. The rest is for us to add. Finding yourself in such painting requires a certain dose of independent (and abstract) thinking. Jacek Świgulski does not serve us postcard-like truisms about the most beautiful corners of Poland. He appeals to our experience, our capacity to identify phenomena and, above all, to our imagination which, as in music, will further specify the observed events or read them out again.

In Jacek Świgulski’s paintings, it is not about the views only, but about the way of perceiving nature. Through his painting, the artist externalises feelings – both these that entail a contact with nature and these that accompany him during his creative process. By doing that, he teaches us to experience landscape and space in a new way. We talk a lot about how nature inspires art, but we forget that this mechanism works both ways. Art inspires nature. It creates a visual language which affects our perception. We learn to notice aesthetic aspects of surrounding world from pictures and photos. Oscar Wilde claimed that James whistler “invented” fog. It had accompanied people for centuries but they really saw it only thanks to art. This is of course an example of “heavyweight” painting. However, many similar discoveries (regardless of their scale) can be made on one’s own, through contact with this or other work – I mean here both artists as well as audience. That is why landscape painting, thanks to openness to sensitivity and subjectivism, will always have something to tell us. It is not only a story about nature but rather a story about experiencing it. Jacek Świgulski uses this advantage in his latest cycle. By transferring an image of surrounding world onto canvas, he at the same time paints an inner landscape.

Paweł Jagiełło