BIRTH OF/WITHIN THE LANDSCAPE

 

For several years, I have been following Jacek Świgulski’s creative progress – once a promising painter, today – an intriguing mature artist. Some of his shows encouraged the reading of briefly outlined female forms with their newspaper tattoos, while others enticed the audience to contemplate landscapes. The artist’s two favorite themes never coincided, however, as if there were two Jacek Świgulskis, or as if he was on an artistic Got Talent show trying to impress the jury with the versatility of his content. At one of his exhibition previews, I wondered what would happen if the two series were shown simultaneously on opposing walls of the same art gallery. That way they could reflect one another and discover – through the audience – any similarities and differences, affinity determined by their author.

 

Birth of/within the Landscape exhibition is an attempt to make this idea come true. The versatile space of Stacja Nowa Gdynia Gallery encourages such exhibition solutions. Monochromatic landscapes (picturesque by nature, combining acrylic with ink and pencil) – on the right, figurative paintings – on the left. As we pass through the center, we find ourselves in a room which (were it not for the sporting and catering surroundings) one might call a chapel – Family Chapel. Holy? Every loving family is sacred in a sense as it rises above the daily “lightness of being”. On this show, quite notably, only two paintings entitled A Family Episode are vertical. One of them with its bright halos openly suggests references to religious motifs. Let us therefore make it the centre of a triptych whose side panels show a dance on the ellipsis of intimacy, where partners create one another. Pastoral bliss? Only at times, in those “golden moments”. In others, their gestures miss each other, the halos scatter in a storm of luminous lines.

 

Since the release of the blockbuster, the adjective Jurassic has been associated with dinosaurs. A whole bestiary as exuberant as the wildlife from millions of years ago. Warm, shallow seas, land covered with jungle, gigantic coniferous trees, huge ferns – they’re all in the past. Today, Jurassic landscape is made up of relicts and monadnocks, reminders of a distant past. Hills lined with stripes of mowed or blooming meadows, limestone rocks that attract beginner climbers, tree lines that enclose the horizon, subtle faults, roads and streams that transect the field of vision. The primordial nature solidified in mild hibernation is highlighted by the absence of humans or man-made objects. Świgulski shows a Jurassic Highland similar to dunes – maybe somewhere in his subconscious he has stored the images of warm, shallow seas and continents being formed. Despite the dynamic of diagonal lines, these painting sketches soothe with their well-thought compositions. It is precisely their tamed, intuitive movement that links them to the figurative series. The landscape is resting after geological storms, just like a woman and a man embraced on a lazy afternoon.

 

And the dog? Perhaps it’s just an element of the composition necessary to balance one of the sides (of the image)? Or maybe it is a modern family member in its own right? Or a theme that undermines the pathos of family sanctity? One thing is certain: while lying on the carpet at the feet of its masters, it reflects the blissful atmosphere, but also irritates at times when it encroaches on intimacy and must be bribed with treats to exit the picture.

 

Piotr Grobliński
translation: Dobrochna Jagiełło

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IN THE TENDER EMBRACE OF WONDER

 

When directed outward, self-discovery – an act which now defines the nature of humanity, replaces religion and tantalizes with the horror of dissatisfaction – makes us experience extremely diverse states. On the one hand, we give in to the promise of recognition of our own uniqueness, on the other – we risk facing the painful fact that projecting our personal experience onto the social plane may highlight our inner shortcomings.

 

With some persistence, one can control their analytical inclinations and quit decoding the spiritual instructions provided to each individual by his or her context, and thus avoid the immersion in a sensory chaos. You can see yourself from the outside for the pure pleasure of looking in, without trying to make a diagnosis, the way one observes a completed old-new work of creation whose form blurs the distinction between excess and deficit.

 

With his series The Surroundings Jacek Świgulski proves that he easily allows himself to be carried away by the idea of looking at (or rather: peeping at) familiar images with the highest possible degree of objectivity, to detect completely new semantic structures and aesthetic value. Subjecting private space to public review completes the joy of discovery – by initiating this collective voyeuristic adventure, the author and protagonist literally contemplates his own life through the eyes of other people.

 

In this kind of self-presentation, a mirror is indispensable – placed as close to the face as possible, as if hoping that sufficiently caressed with one’s gaze the glass surface will reveal what the skin conceals. Świgulski scrutinizes the face from every aspect, inquisitively, but not clinically, rather like a child hypnotized by curiosity. It is a child of exceptionally mature sensibility who can’t be bribed with details and doesn’t focus its gaze on the pupil or wrinkle, but prompted by its seeker impulse hungrily absorbs the features of a face in the belief that one of them will reveal a completely new surprise. Unfortunately, fascination turns into boredom as it becomes clear that an individual pressured by a blank space also becomes void – fading, disintegrating and dwindling away. For the game to continue, some distance and a change of perspective are essential.

 

In his monumental work The Book of Disquiet, Fernando Pessoa, a brilliant apologist of potentiality and indecisiveness, declares that the surroundings constitute the spirit of things. Świgulski takes a humanistic step forward to find in his surroundings the source of human nature. The tale of it gains merit in this (non)autobiographical series only when a second character enters the stage and brings with it an infinite cosmos of interactions and relationships. It enters unexpectedly, emerging from the depths of canvas as a being fused to the body of another (The Whispered Encounter and A Grey Memory of the Games) only to leave the host (Lyrical duo series) and gain its own bodily form. An individual subjected to isolation is a coagulated ersatz of themselves and becomes truly alive only when close to another human being – and even if the two remain in an embrace so tight that they become one, they still trigger inner shifts, tremors, restlessness. For Świgulski, movement and the relationality it dictates form the most interesting and reliable peephole showing the reality. He thoughtfully observes as two people form configurations, as they converse balancing the load between them and mark their presence in space to ignite the painter’s imagination with the thought that each shift hides some motivation: desire, hope or pain.

 

Świgulski explores each theme and chooses more daring formal experiments in an attempt to define the emotional conditions of dynamism as precisely as possible. The series becomes even more personal but Świgulski successfully finds a balance between the intimate overtone of his depictions and their clarity. However, in the context of the most intimate realm, it is difficult to maintain a journalistic matter-of-factness, which is why the artist’s metaphysical inclinations soon become apparent. They may be expressed in each perpetuated brush stroke, a strong colour accent, or sometimes the title of a piece which suggests that human interactions hide something elusive and indefinable but still extremely important. Where the eye does not guarantee perception at a satisfactory level, spiritualism arises demanding that reality be filtered through the (in this case: oriental) sacred. The photographic films of life’s prose attain a fairy-tale panache, allowing us to separate them from superficial literalness and to reflect on the dichotomy of our choices (The Afternoon Clash I and II), lost dreams (The Awakening, A life that didn’t happen), or the sense of absence (Expectancy, Farewell). All of these experiences lead to movement – even the motionless silhouettes seem to burst with motor potential that will free them from inertia at any minute.

 

By using his own micro-culture as the starting point and then gradually deconstructing it, Świgulski attempts to outline a number of basic values concerning the entire society and motivating each individual to act. Genre scenes without any characteristics pertaining to the period, space or identity become an omninarrative, our collective history. Still, it is inadvisable to focus on any potential direction this process may take – what counts is the current opportunity to shape it at will and experience a sense of wonder. In a decade of widespread manipulation, ambiguity is closer to the truth than you might think.

 

Krzysztof Badowiec
translation: Dobrochna Jagiełło

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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

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