In my latest works from the Flights series, I adopt a radical postulate of lightness, following the age-old method used in constructing flying devices. In my case, it is based on the maximum and multifunctional use of every element that makes up the picture-object. In particular, it also visually exploits those components of the painting that are usually invisible, such as the canvas stretcher and the wedges. In this way, everything that constitutes the painting’s physical, seemingly ignored structure is emancipated. Significantly, the wall, the usually hidden support element of the painting, in my process, also takes on the special and important role of reflector, reflecting the light that filters back through the translucent satin/stilon and illuminating the whole structure from behind.
I gave a special role to the wooden elements attached to the edge of the stretcher bars. It is a situation in which the wooden structure of the stretcher seems to extend outwards. It covers the paintwork, casts shadows, creates rhythms, and extends beyond the edge of the painting. Through the play of shadows and reflections, the wooden elements de-emphasise the direction of the light falling on the painting, which is no longer an anonymous condition of perception but rather an agent of the painterly situation that the viewer is aware of. Light “propels” my paintings in the same way air inflates a hang-glider’s wing. A special situation in this phenomenon is the apparent contradictions arising from the overlapping rhythms of the painted folds with the creases actually formed on the surface of the stilon.
When I paint, I evoke afterimages from a bird’s eye view. I draw on the tradition of aero-picture. I play with the surface of the canvas. I cultivate a kind of action painting with the airbrush. As a painter I worship light.
The first of this year’s works I dedicated to the legendary figure of the Podkarpacie aviator Jan Wnęk from Odporyszów. The story of the carpenter-aviator provided me with a pretext for a series of activities that are on the one hand formalistic and on the other essentially mystical. Stories and tales provoke visualizations in me. The fascination with a story is for me what the need for a bath was for Archimedes, otherwise he would not have immersed himself in water..
In the paintings I am currently working on, I am grappling with another inalienable component of painting – the medium of colour – paint. I place it in the foreground so that, like a coulisse, it begins to hide the surface of the painting, building up like a stalagmite. It is hard for me to write about it now, it is too early. Is it a fetish? Or an alchemical building material? Is it a structural and material reproduction of the model previously presented on the canvas?
Bogumił Książek
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