Henryk Cześnik: The Cześnik Cut

“A poem is a vein of sunlight on the wall…”

K. K. Baczyński

Many writers, literary theorists and critics would probably reject such a definition of a poem — of poetry. Without entering the intricacies of their positions, all of them, and all of us as readers of poetry, acknowledge Baczyński’s greatness, his brilliant intuition and the precision with which he created poetic images through words.

In the fragment quoted above, Baczyński did not intend to define or precisely characterise a poem, yet the image of one he created is more complete than every logical attempt to define poetry. To read it — or perhaps rather to absorb it into one’s consciousness — requires a particular openness and sensitivity to words and to the world around us.

What, then, is a picture?.. a painted picture?..

Today, in an age that may already be post-postmodern or even post-painting — the end of painting has, after all, been proclaimed repeatedly — the question assumes fundamental significance. Stanisław Fijałkowski continues to paint; Maria Stangret returned to painting with renewed passion; Jarosław Modzelewski paints; finally, Sasnal paints.

And Henryk Cześnik paints too. He paints, as he remarked somewhat half-seriously about his pictures, in the same way as twenty years ago. Whether it is truly the same is another matter, one I propose setting aside, since the transformation of his painting over time may be too specific a question. More important is the general concept of painting that Cześnik adopted many years ago and to which he appears to remain faithful. Returning to the phenomenon of painting, the question recurs: what is a picture?

After the invention of photography freed painting from its formerly indispensable task of reproducing reality, it found another role. It could concentrate egocentrically on itself and become a tool not for reporting on the world, but for investigating it — including the investigation of its own phenomenon and existence, while offering painters a means of exploring their sensual, mental and psychological sensibilities. Władysław Strzemiński gave the most radical answer to these egocentric inquiries into the nature of painting when he created his series of Unist pictures and formulated the thesis that “a picture is an object intended for looking”. It is a rectangle of canvas covered with paint, while the question of subject does not matter, nor indeed does content. “Non-objectivity, abstraction, is the same kind of content as any other content.” Deeply present in artists’ awareness, these questions — formulated aloud and with such radical force by Strzemiński only in 1928 — exerted, and continue to exert, a decisive influence on contemporary painting.

Yet contrary to Strzemiński’s theses, art is a form of communication: with oneself and one’s surroundings. The picture is one form of art’s language.

I will not attempt to explain what painting is for Henryk Cześnik. One would have to ask him, and I expect the answer can be found in Krzysztof Cichoń’s interview with the artist. I want to remain outside the canvas, to become one recipient of the communication constituted by a picture — Henryk Cześnik’s picture — and to view these works within a broader context of creative conditions.

I have known these pictures for more than twenty years. To me, they are “a vein of sunlight on the wall”. Poetry. At times menacing, at others extraordinarily sublime. They reveal the beauty and baseness of the human condition. They record their creator’s reflections and emotions, but — perhaps more importantly for us as viewers — they remain open to us. Like those “veins of sunlight on the wall”, clouds in the sky, accidental shadows and stains upon a wall, the “shadows led out from things” by Cześnik may once again be connected with the “things” of our personal world: the events that befall us and our thoughts. In his painting, Cześnik achieved what remained practically unattainable for many artists: he overcame the disintegration of form. The loosening of formal relationships within his pictures is nothing other than a way of opening them to the viewer.

For a young painter beginning his career in the 1970s, the disintegration of form — one of the dramatic experiences of the second half of the twentieth century — was probably still an immediate issue. It was connected with the crisis of worldviews during the 1930s and 1940s. The social crises preceding the Second World War and the experience of the war itself put an end, if not to naïve faith, then certainly to excessive confidence in the possibility of comprehensive formal and ideological solutions, both socially and artistically. Artists lost faith in art’s emancipatory mission and in the myth of the artist as an engineer of souls and organiser of the collective imagination. “And then Tachisme appeared — like a revelation,” Teresa Tyszkiewicz wrote, and “with it the tormenting problem of inventing form disappeared. Instinct, spontaneity and the laws governing matter inspired boundless trust. It was a great, necessary and underappreciated stage of development.” Henryk Cześnik’s work provides excellent evidence of how prophetic Tyszkiewicz’s words were. His painting — apparently unrelated to Tachisme or Art Informel — was shaped principally by these very experiences and by instinct, spontaneity and the laws of matter.

I recently had an opportunity to listen to Zbigniew Gostomski sharing his reflections on art with students at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. Among other things, he spoke of the extraordinary intuition and skill — granted only to certain artists — of sensing the nervous tissue of a canvas or sheet of paper. With one blow of the brush or a single drawn line, they can activate the inner tensions concealed within the apparently empty surface of a future picture. I believe Cześnik to be among the artists endowed with this exceptional quality. The pure space of a sheet of paper or a picture is a value in itself. It possesses shape, proportions, colour, texture and fragility, and every accidental blemish — stain, fold, fingernail mark… — causes pain. Introduced without feeling or intuition, such marks hurt because they violate an ideal world. By intervening within that world, one can expand it: enriching its texture through roughness, gloss or the radiance of paint and ink; introducing the tensions of a visual structure through division and line; and finally using familiar, legible shapes to construct mental messages. Yet these actions must not destroy the originally perfect structure of the paper or canvas, even when — as in Cześnik’s work — the support is a hospital sheet or transparent film with all its inherent properties. This requires skill and intuition — wisdom. A wisdom born of listening to oneself and respecting one’s surroundings and what life brings. I believe this active participation in the world prevented Henryk Cześnik — like Art Informel before him — from sealing himself within painterly matter alone.

Tadeusz Kantor, the great advocate and promoter of Art Informel in Poland, began placing fragments of found materials on his canvases as early as the late 1950s. This might be interpreted as a step towards Matter Painting, but from the perspective of his later actions and statements it was more likely a move towards “touching” the concrete reality of the object — “I was always interested in the object,” he wrote — and returning to the reality of the world.

Maria Stangret was likewise aware of the trap concealed in gestural painting, as she called her Informel works. In 1964, she placed repeated heads of cherubs, printed on what today we would call stickers, upon one of her paintings. In a later interview she said that “above all, one must oppose one’s own gestures, which through repetition begin to become excessively automatic”. This exceptionally apt remark — bordering almost on a pun, like many of Maria Stangret’s statements — was directed against her own gestures: both the literal gestures she employed in painting and those understood as expressions of an ideological position.

Thus a new language of painting was born, operating on two levels of articulation. The first is the speech of painterly matter, a level whose importance and independent existence Art Informel made us aware of. What matters here is the texture of both support and applied paint; colour in the full range of harmonies and tensions that can be achieved; and finally the dynamism of gesture, both in the tensions of the composition and in the energy of stain, line or emerging form, as well as in the literal movement made by the artist’s hand. The second level of this language arises in essence from the creator’s extrovert attitude, for whom the surrounding world and unfolding life are sources of profound experience. Hence the attempts mentioned above by Kantor and Maria Stangret to connect painting with the actual world. This turn towards objecthood when art becomes excessively egotistical was already known at the beginning of the twentieth century. It was, after all, how Braque’s and Picasso’s collages came into being.

Henryk Cześnik found his place within this conception of art and painting during the 1970s. Yet analysis of most of his paintings and drawings — in which the boundary between painting and drawing is effectively erased — reveals that the most important point of reference for Cześnik is the human being: himself, Henryk Cześnik, or another person. This awareness of one’s own consciousness and a consciousness directed towards the world — being in the world and being with other people — is a fundamental premise of Existentialism, a current that profoundly shaped human attitudes, especially after the pre-war experiences already discussed. The theses of Existentialism also played a significant role in the formation of independent and free attitudes among many Poles, including Cześnik, I believe, towards the doctrine of state-building or society-building socialism.

Consciousness intentionally directed towards the world, combined with awareness of one’s own consciousness, leaves the human being internally divided. These are the people — himself among them — whom Cześnik creates, placing them within equally “torn” and fragmentary realities. This rupture and fragmentation of form, which signifies openness rather than closure as argued above, proved an excellent equivalent of a worldview.

Cześnik’s exceptional intuition decides which fragments of reality to select and combine. It may be compared with the precision of Baczyński, quoted at the beginning, whose choice of words — like Cześnik’s stain, line, colour, allusion or even direct quotation — sets our consciousness in motion. At that moment the work, the picture, is fulfilled. For each of us, this fulfilment occurs on a different level. For some it remains an exclusively sensual experience; for others, a hope: “in the beautiful eyes of the girls, in the expression of their lips, there appears a certain possibility — the possibility of redemptive, purifying love” (K. Stanisławski). Some will read the paintings like an ethical treatise: “In creating his aesthetic ego, he struggled with the Absolute of Beauty. While working on the pictures, the artist tried to answer questions from the sphere of ethics that also troubled him. Touching the thin boundary of perversion, he confronted the Absolute of Good through outrage” (A. Matynia, M. Malec). Everything depends upon our own awareness of ourselves and of the world in which we live.