| 20/11/2008 | Exhibitions | Poland |
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Marcin Lukasiewicz: Medicine
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| Posted by Olenka Nowak | |
Warsaw, November 15 – December 9, 2008  LETO Gallery is announce the opening of MARCIN LUKASIEWICZ “Medicine†exhibition on November 14, 2008. This is his first solo show at Warsaw. Fear of emptiness. Ubiquitous and quiet emptiness. Leaking carefully from the corners of theatrical scenery. The main characters are trapped in loneliness and dare to make the difficult step into the unknown. Reconstructing dream imaginations and building an unreal world is combined with veristic details. It is a cunning trick that leaves an impression of surgery performed on an open imagination. Marcin Åukasiewicz exposes the weakness of human logic that could not resolve the deadlock in relation to the capabilities of the human brain. His art evokes a bizarre lethargy. Our off-guard vigilance is focused on an entity and needs some time to discover lurking dangers. the truth is out there Marcin Åukasiewicz 1998-2004 studied at the Institute of Fine Arts, Maria Curie-SkÅ‚odowska University, Lublin. Life sentence... The function of the artist is to provoke the recepient in his/ her contact with the artwork. Åukasiewicz communicates the knowledge he has already gained. From the very beginning in his art he’s been thoroughly using the painting process. Yet he’s done so in his own way. He is even able to make five large-format ‘draft-paintings’ daily only to register a new idea. He gets unpatient very fast if he has nothing to do. In consequence, his attitude has caused him to ‘serve the sentence’ he had accepted himself – painting. The artist expresses himself in drawing, sculpture and photography. Yet he reaches the fullest expression in painting. His curiosity is focused on life in all its aspects, elite music projects and comic printouts. He uses a variety of formats and techniques: pencil, crayon, pen and ink drawing, watercolour and acrylic painting. His painting reveals a whole range of formal research, from ‘classical’, symmetrical compositions to transgression on light, perspective and composition principles or even their negation. Åukasiewicz is interested in canvas construction, the relation to its shape and colour. Some works are covered with a thin, subtle, almost invisible layer; in others an object becomes an almost monochromatic chiaroscuro bas-relief. The eruption of themes, drastic motives, the easiness in treating form and composition prove that the artist works beyond aesthetic and customary limitations. Åukasiewicz often shows human figures in rather unusual poses: huddled as if in fear of something (and coming from something), tied with ‘ropes of their instilled knowledge’. The painter fashions their bodies according to the subconsciously established canon. He ‘abuses’ the protagonists of his paintings, deforms sadistically their bodies, giving them a new identity, though not always in agreement with our categories of memory and perception. Figurative motives appear in the artist’s current art too. Fascination with disgust, lifelessness or decomposition do belong to the same symbolic fascinations as being bewitched by the rare beauty of a human being or nature. The oscillation between gloomy semi-darkness of backyards and plants construction melting in radiation glow, between mould eruptions on wet walls and the blooming weed of wild gardens – how close it is to various painting and literary poetics and moods towards the end of the 19th century. Pathological power of imagination... Åukasiewicz was coming to his own expression, his individual artistic method, following the difficult way of work in isolation without professors and pseudo connoisseurs’ corrections. He is open to the subconscious, not afraid of what he’s going to find there. These experiences begun to shape his ‘realistic’ painting which nowadays is attractive only to few artists. Oil painting has become the technique the painter is constantly faithful to. The meaning of colour, composition and colour relations or sophisticated surfaces aren’t the artist’s priority any longer. On the contrary, they might even become an obstacle in achieving his aim – to express his subconscious vision. The irritating lack of clarity of painting relations in Marcin’s art is one of the results of these penetrations. It is a total game of appearances and illusions, ambiguities and sick delusions being ingredients of his paintings-medicines provoking to guess and leading nowhere, paintings of ‘unreleased’ tension. Earlier pictures were sadistic-expressionist in character – screaming figures, stretched faces, injured and mutated bodies, defecation, death, shapeless forms... There was some stylistic relation to Gottfried Helnwein’s paintings. Misunderstanding Helnwein’s ideas resulted in confiscation of his first exhibition by the police and calling him an iconoclast. Helnwein’s painting, similarly to Åukasiewicz’s, is mostly traditional. They both keep experimenting and widening the range of applied media. Helnwein is also a designer of decorations, costumes and make-ups to numerous theatre spectacles. He’s an author of frescoes and multimedia activities. Åukasiewicz visits mysterious places, collects visualities, arranges artistic studios, collects objects and settles situations in order to translate them later into paintings. They are sequences which set ides for paintings. Then, in the process of creation, the rest of themes are revealed. But at the same time it’s just a fragmentary truth, out of the context of the confrontational character and visionary stylistics of the painting. Today’s paintings represent closed off places, abandoned factories and the abundance of meanings. Children playing carelessly, the symbols of the obvious in the hands of decomposition and decay... – a theme good as any other but painted in a more or less muted tone, it emphasizes the above values. Analogically, music calls this a minor key. It turns our minds to one, more winning ingredient. Many artists are painters. It’s astonishing that the mystery of painting, impossible to be verbalized and confined in single fragments, can be revealed only in widely understood exhibitionist processes. Nobody knows after all if taking off one’s coat already signals a final show... Too generous in messages… All the time the mechanism of creating and functioning of the painting is the theme of Åukasiewicz’s art. Particular elements of the picture have equal rights. There’s no unimportant and unwanted stage which wouldn’t be inspiring for the ‘approaching’ one. Thanks to the artist’s refined skills and sensitivity such element as controlled disgust is turned into reflection on and the acceptance of the theme. He undoubtedly has the right to such representations because of his intuition and impressive consistent approach, unusual these days resistance to any temptations. The above artistic attitude and the fact that the artist has totally given himself over to creation matters, make him closer to the solution to his own riddles and the remedy to his mental exhibitionism. Going back to the time when we were both students, I remember how important it was to Marcin to ‘collect’ all the instructions on skills perfection, which were becoming to him a field for experiments at classes. The fact of current non-usability of the artistic method is then relevant in this context. Marcin doesn’t already have to prove he can; now his method is tamed and patiently waits for the artist’s fancies. The titles of his paintings, as if explaining the meanings to the viewer, in fact, intensify the lack of clarity. The worlds he proposes have the character of a cage. One may be given a clue in views from the windows, alcoves or cracks showing what’s outside the painting. Those invisible outside areas get unusually activated. It’s one of the most remarkable phenomena one can observe in Marcin’s works. A couple of chimneys, a number of patches stretched into the horizon, smoke and the fragmentary flora build a wide range of meanings in the viewer’s mind and help in territory occupation. Perhaps it’s a vision of a near future or maybe of the times that will never come. Åukasiewicz’s painting combines elements of iconography of a nuclear era and the restrain in tasting the future. It’s a world full of excrements of masters of survival on a contaminated ground. You’d better not enter the painting without suitable safety clothes and content-related background. What it’s about most of all is to compose the canvas space a human being walks through or, for some reasons he/she isn’t able to enter. It’s interesting to examine this space, search for meanings and perspectives which continue to escape human perception and, at the same time, the area of conceptions become wider and deeper. Grain is not important, just the lack of it... Marcin’s painting fills some empty place that in universal art is filled only by few artists. It’s hard to look for their equivalents in Poland. Scarce are enthusiasts of mimetism and surreal atmosphere with a completely different artwork poetics at the same time. The public, tired with formal experiments, and maybe with some monotony of isolated visual language of avantguarde, turned with interest to painting that expresses the problems of the epoque with drama and the use of traditional methods. The artist penetrating the subconscious, arrives at the same time at similar needs of the viewers, waken by psychoanalysis and existentialism. Visionary imagination and gloomy atmosphere of mystery moved the recepient’s experiences from the level of aesthetic and intellectual contemplation to the sphere of psychology and emotions. text by: Robert KuÅ›mirowski ________________________ LETO Gallery Director: Marta Kolakowska ul. Hoza 9c, Warsaw +48 501 696 440, +48 22 499 59 16 galeria@leto.pl www.leto.pl |