The Art Conspiracy, Our ruins are even more beautiful, part 1
The Art Conspiracy, Our ruins are even more beautiful, part 1
What appears after an explosion? The image of the world after the flood, Europe after the rain or a fresco by Uccello. The inspiration by not-really-top shelf movies is visible, although there is a bit of Tarkowski too (Stalker, The Mirror). And it is not just, as Benjamin stresses, human inclination to perceive their times as the times of crisis and the end of civilization - every époque sees itself as the decadent one, even the ancient Egyptians used hieroglyphs to say that all had been better in days of yore, even tomatoes had different taste, not to mention the cucumbers. Even Cato used to say that the world would soon end, Rome stinks, and the traffic jams make it impossible to get anywhere.
The search for happiness in a person’s private past, and the bitter experience of losing it on the political level. It is both an evaluation of the doubtful results of revolution, and an attempt to penetrate that particular space of rapidly growing freedom. Which is a space of magic as much as it is of horror. Analogical to contemporary times since the French revolution. We try to look into that ambivalent space through a dirty membrane of imagination. It seems like we are locked in our past life form like in a room made of two-way mirrors, screens from behind which future (or present) looks at us like Borges’ mirror creatures. Hence the fantasies of the absence of the human race, visions of Dante’s basso loco, the vestibule of the unthinkable. Kleczewska has shown us those silent observers in the last scene of Marat/Sade.
The association of a meditative space with an ambivalent ruin, but a construction at the same time, is exactly what links the series of exhibitions. They all enter the peculiar space where forms permeate each other, and which is ruled by paradox like Lewis Carroll’s space.
Heart of Darkness
Looking at Rafał Milach’s pictures in Yours gallery I could not get the novel by Conrad out of my head. “And this also,” said Marlow suddenly, “has been one of the dark places of the earth.” The black sea of concrete exists on two levels. One of them is quite clear: a failure of the Soviet style colonialism, the ruins of the terror of reason. The tracts of concrete spat by Ukraine today. The same Ukraine that used to spit corn and fortunes as a victim of our native colonialism. The fact that our slaves were actually white is no excuse.
In one of the photos the sea hitting the concrete breakwater seems to be just a reflection of the concrete ocean. Just like in the surreal landscape with a shepherdess with old blocks of flats, like mammoth remains, in the background. The second game which appears here seems to be taken out of Magritte’s paintings. Several tools are at play. The most visible is painting, the heroic, romantic XIX century marine and landscape painting, and the Russian realism. The said landscape with a shepherdess has been put in a heavy gilded frame. The composition and format of portraits imitate those of gentlemen officers from the navy or, one level down, Russian realism. One of my favorite works is the first one we see, a photo wallpaper hung on a gallery wall, which is a photo of another mural displaying idealized seascape. Its colour, faded in the sun, makes you think of the Mediterranean Sea. The dominating feeling about it is surreality. Similar to Tarkowski’s landscapes, which he made surreal with long sequences. Or to one of Calvino’s invisible cities reflected in the lake, on of many searches for happiness.
The association with Conrad, that I somehow cannot exorcise is about the same action: to show the heart of darkness present in the civilized by means of a small correction of display. Conrad’s monstrously long sentences have similar effect as the romantic documentation of the abandoned, post-apocalypse space. Baudelaire would be glad, it is like from outside this world, where people hate nature so much that they got rid of every last sprouting plant.
The Black Sea of Concrete, Rafał Milach, Yours Gallery
The porn star stare
What catches my attention in Bujnowski’s paintings is the meticulous mimetism of the paint layer. Those huge canvas almost look like they are cast in concrete. Just like the one luxury housing estates and modern office buildings are built. The eye sockets from the title are darkly glimmering empty windows of an unfinished building. A ruin and a construction at the same time. The Derridean topos of recording and erasing is realized here. It has something of the cabalistic world of layers to is as well. The resistance of matter effect, a malicious coincidence. It also generates associations with a knows series of photographs portraying a very Polish architectural topos. Unfinished houses, the symbol of the first capitalist years failure, a glimpse at the better future of the 90s.
The eye sockets have a look of disappointed hopes. But not only. It is a look of a porn star. Bujnowski is not hiding that the materiality of his paintings, their physicality is what constitutes their essence. It is the kind of painting which as medium does not disappear in its message. Which is called “pure means”, or seems to be it. A painting shows itself instead of disappearing in what it portrays. Cinema historians found it new and disturbing in Bergman’s Summer with Monika (1952), the moment when Harriet Anderson, the leading character, suddenly looks straight into the camera lens. Bergman himself considered this the first time in the history of the cinema when a direct contact with the audience was established. Later, pornography and journalism trivialized this method. We are now used to the porn star looking at the camera while doing what she has to do, which is like she is more interested in the audience than her partner. It is also, like in the case of the ruin, pure architecture, a modernist dream come true - architecture without a purpose. Existing only virtually, not polluted by resistance. A comparison with The Ruin by Monika Sosnowska comes to mind. My suspicions are confirmed by the paintings from The Fog series, where architecture and space become a blur, as they are absorbed by the greyness that looks like the neutral background for spatial visualization programs. A similar effect is achieved The Gambler, where artifacts without a function, but with a strong suggestion of one, familiar and strange at the same time, without a material reality, become just a semblance on its own.
The Eye Sockets, The Fog, The Gambler, Rafał Bujnowski, RASTER Gallery
And what if I were crazy for heavy industry?
The exhibition at Asymetria gallery completes this strategy of stripping the forms off their function, making them selfless.
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Esthetic detachment of the function, a simple action, yet very attractive visually. The exhibition makes a good impression, the way of expression of the photos is modern, but at the same time a just a little bit fusty already. They are the kind of nostalgic photos people do not take these days anymore. Except for thousands of Warsaw academies students, as a form of exercise. Which is not a sign of depreciation at all, it is more of an ascertainment of the change in our modernity. Tadeusz Sumiński, through his photos, turns a factory into a dreamworld, full of surreal, abstract shapes. Its amplification is the latest simplicity in architecture, a modernist dream and, as we shall soon find out, a rather toxic one.
Factory and Form, Sumiński, Galeria Asymetria
Wall-e at Raster
Nicolas Grospierre elaborates on the subject of the ruin-mirror resonance in the times of instant architecture. An illusory winter garden appeared inside the Ciech building (built in the 80.; soon to be put down due to growing concentration of asbestos). Closed in a glass cube it is the last remnant of life in the space destined to die. The idea is as if taken out of a disaster movie, but it definitely moves my poetic side. In the heart of the upside-down pyramid, one of the icons of modern architecture, a winter garden surrounded by two-way mirrors. Nature, reproducing itself visually and virtually projects its reflection on the dead realm, inside which it is trapped. Grospierre has built a thrilling catopticon, an image of a monad multiplying layers of space.
Like Olejniczak, Bujnowski or Milach, Grospierre has created a specific kind of time, a stopped continuum. The present which does not have the past, and the future is not constant, but sort of a bag for crushed present dreams. After all, monads do not have windows, but half-transparent screens at best. That time, that endless existence is confronted with the inevitable moment of destruction, the dismantling of the building. The inevitable destruction of that space, however, is necessary for the time-space experience.
Sadly, there will be no Eve coming to console us and save us from the post disaster loneliness.
Glass Trap, Nicolas Grospierre, RASTER Gallery
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