THE REVOLVING LINE

Going to Dresden…

One thing is certain: he never imagined that he could be anything other than an artist — a painter, to be precise. His first memory, dating back many years and rooted in the depths of the Eastern Bloc era, contains, beyond its general outline, an interesting detail. In a recent interview with Kazimierz Nowosielski, asked when he realised “what painting was about”, he replied: “When I was around ten and saw a Van Gogh in the Dresden Gallery. I travelled there with my mother, knowing that I absolutely had to stand before a canvas by this painter and no other. (…) I went to that temple of art with the strongest resolve of my life: I would become a painter like Van Gogh. And I would need no schools — life and passion alone would be enough.”

Life itself disproved this last sentence — which, incidentally, has become almost an obligatory, politically correct slogan for successive generations of young actors, visual artists and writers now entering the scene — and Cześnik’s youthful bravado of the 1960s. It first opened to him the lecture halls of the State Higher School of Fine Arts in Gdańsk, where his sensibility and skills were shaped by professors including Bohdan Borowski, Rajmund Pietkiewicz, Kazimierz Ostrowski and Roman Usarewicz. It then made him a professor of that same institution, now the Academy of Fine Arts. Yet this was not, as one might suppose, another soap-opera variation on the nonconformist who rebels before finally being tamed by a regular salary and professorship. What matters in this story is the authentic, irreplaceable and irrational mode of existing in and experiencing the world known in statistics and newspaper society columns as “being an artist”. In the hammy performances so eagerly multiplied by assorted talk shows, this status differs in no way from that of a nightclub clown or vendor of consumer dreams. For Henryk Cześnik, however, “being an artist” means something entirely different: a constant inner compulsion to transform reality into visions of his own, untamed by seasonal fashion or the directives of influential critics. The youthful patronage of Van Gogh — “this painter and no other”, as Cześnik stressed in the interview — concerned not so much a particular style or choice of subject as the artist’s very attitude. Today, when notions such as “being rebellious” or “an unconventional outsider” have become permanent fixtures of market advertising, it is almost embarrassing to ascribe such an attitude to someone who, like Henryk Cześnik, has practised it consistently from the very beginning of his artistic career. It would, incidentally, be interesting to ask from which sources — books, reproductions or articles — the young boy travelling with his mother to Dresden in the GDR had derived his knowledge of Van Gogh. At the Gdańsk museum at the time, besides Memling’s celebrated Last Judgement, one could see several outstanding Netherlandish landscape painters, albeit ones regarded as secondary. In short, what drew the adolescent more powerfully in the promise of encountering an original canvas by the Master: the legend of the accursed artist, or his way of applying paint layer upon layer?

Looking for a Comparison

We always look for one, even when we manage to pretend it is unimportant. Comparison, like repetition, is one of the necessary conditions of cognition. This applies as much to the exact sciences as to art. Having looked repeatedly at Henryk Cześnik’s work, and having acquired over the years a store of knowledge about its creator — anecdotal, social and finally gossipy — I could not resist the impression that, in his artistic actions and his life, he resembles to some extent the colourful figure of Vladimír in Bohumil Hrabal’s Tender Barbarian. To my mind, the affinity is less formal than mental: it concerns above all a philosophy of life, a philosophy of making art and the fusion of these two realities into a coherent whole. Like the visual and literary avant-garde in Prague, Henryk Cześnik subscribes to the view that no sphere of our reality is incapable, once transformed, of becoming art. Street graffiti, an oil stain on the road, sunlight reflected on the peeling plaster of a tenement house, the face of a tram driver in a passing carriage, the cover of a long-read book, or a theatre ticket found in the drawer of a grandmother’s chest — all this, together with sunrises and sunsets, the hubbub of conversations in a bar, enriched by the dodecaphony of the city’s lights and sounds, forms a mine of motifs, an inexhaustible reservoir of inspiration and delight for the artist: the unhurried passer-by and ecstatic worshipper of everyday life. If the art of past centuries was meant to bring the extraordinary into the ordinary, the transcendent into the tangible, then the Prague avant-garde transformed the most ordinary elements of everyday life into things unique, magical and uncommon. This powerful feature distinguished Czech Surrealism from its French counterpart, which sought inspiration not “here”, on its own street, but “there”, in the subconscious, myth and the realm of dreams. Bohumil Hrabal put it with remarkable precision and concision in Tender Barbarian: “All of you who admire Vladimír’s prints should know that these little adventures may happen to you too. I think that if you grant them the meaning of an extraordinary encounter, you too will begin to regard your life as exceptional, and therefore beautiful. Leap without fear, head first, into the irretrievable present, for only then, in the blink of an eye, will you find yourselves in the very heart of eternity.” Henryk Cześnik proposes a similar leap into the “irretrievable present”, in his own name and in a style very much his own. When he once found himself in a hotel where the doors were being replaced, he immediately appropriated the material in order to create upon it — or rather within it — another record of a passing moment. The same happened with a mirror found in a skip at a building site. It recalls not so much Bulgakov’s Notes on the Cuff as Miron Białoszewski’s The Revolution of Things: the artist is one who creates the unusual out of commonplace — not to say inferior — material. The point is to “turn” each thing in the right way, transform it and inspire it with a new, personal meaning. This practice is not, of course, entirely self-appointed or devastatingly innovative. In the postmodern world, as in Dante’s Purgatory, we are condemned to a system of reflections, repeated gestures, repetitions, echoes, sighs and raptures discovered before us. Yet only those who, without concealing this difficult situation, nevertheless try to endow reality with a handwriting of their own have a chance of survival. Henryk Cześnik — who also resembles Hrabal’s Vladimír in the countless anecdotes that have become a permanent part of the atmosphere of Gdańsk and Sopot — has created a distinctive artistic hand. His soft, oval line, emerging from the blurred ground of a patch of colour and often enriched by a surreal inscription, is recognisable in every gallery and every situation.

Instead of Analysis

Besides all this, of course, there is a substantial catalogue of artistic movements and individual artists who can or should be invoked when analysing Cześnik’s work. His Expressionism, essentially lyrical and more often employing humour than seeking to shock, appears to owe more to Paul Klee, Raoul Dufy and even Joan Miró than to Egon Schiele or Oskar Kokoschka. It might offer fertile ground for a psychoanalyst: consider, for example, the recurring motif of the car — a little car, only apparently clumsily rounded, with wheels “stuck on”. Why does a mature artist in complete command of his technique so often use the language of a “scribble”, the shorthand of a child, a sophisticated naïveté? He is surely familiar with Gombrowicz’s lesson of the artist with a child lurking within: the complex game of youth unseating maturity and maturity seeing itself reflected in the youngster. But does this exhaust our insistent curiosity about his choice of these particular means rather than others? How, for example, are we to interpret the artist’s evident predilection for the precarious balance between the outline of a human head and the crown of a penis? Among Cześnik’s characteristic motifs is another: a copulating couple with a gargantuan leg protruding from it. Perhaps this is the point at which we should mention New Figuration, which — from the 1959 New York exhibition to Bacon’s steadily growing European fame — exerted such a powerful influence on many of Cześnik’s older colleagues and contemporaries in Gdańsk, including the remarkable paintings of Wiesław Markowski. As always in such situations, an erudite roll call resembling a telephone directory complicates rather than facilitates access to the heart of the matter. If I had to find a single verbal formula to describe this painting, I would say that its subjects derive from the characteristically Central European grotesque of fate and history, while its forms oscillate between lyrical abstraction, Expressionism and that oldest, soft yet by no means primitive line with which anonymous artists represented animals in the caves of Lascaux and on the walls of Font-de-Gaume. Perhaps this is a concealed and highly sophisticated return to the sources of our shared childhood?