Piotr Naliwajko: Only Large Paintings

Is art a realm of freedom? Should art create values, or should it represent existing doctrines? Is it possible today to rewrite old stories? Does a work of art belong only to the period in which it was created? Is there still room for a theatre curtain in contemporary theatre, where staging was invented to present audiences with works created in another age? A curtain that was present for hundreds of years, yet has been absent for almost a century. Is contemporary society capable of accepting a curtain in the theatre? Is society prepared to participate in the creation of a curtain, including financially? A presentation of Piotr Naliwajko’s work will undoubtedly prompt questions such as these. Among the artist’s many works at the exhibition Only Large Paintings, visitors will see a miniature design for a theatre curtain entitled An Astonishingly Non-Industrial Spirit, whose final, full-scale form ought to be installed at Teatr Powszechny in Łódź in 2006.

Piotr Naliwajko’s paintings have always provoked lively responses — and very different ones. The range of impressions is aptly illustrated by the texts published below. They extend from the profound elation described by Dr Jacek Kurek — the most magnificent moment in life, a moment capable of enduring for eternity — through the measured position of Professor Lechosław Lameński, who, while acknowledging the reservations others have expressed about Naliwajko’s work, believes that the artist should find a permanent place for himself and his art in the swift current of the many movements and tendencies present in contemporary art, to Dr Jarosław Krawczyk’s genuine irritation with a painter who attempts to cause scandal in a manner at once methodical and banal. The fact that Piotr Naliwajko’s paintings are frequently exhibited and purchased in the United States might suggest that the artist is a regular visitor there. Nothing could be further from the truth. When I first met him and asked about his visits to the United States, he replied that he had never been there and that, as a lad from Chorzów, he preferred to remain close to home. The interior of the Batory Municipal Cultural Centre in Chorzów, where the artist has his studio, is decorated with an impressive number of works made by Naliwajko’s students. For twenty years, he has taught children, young people and adults there. More than fifty of his students have since graduated from academies of fine arts or schools of architecture. These are merely two further dimensions of the artist’s creative path. With his individuality, personality, sound technique and care for detail, Piotr Naliwajko is undoubtedly the “ideal” creator of a curtain. It would of course be easier, instead of commissioning a “richly” painted curtain — one so well suited to Łódź at the turn of the twentieth century — to follow Agnieszka Kuczyńska’s suggestion in her engaging essay: “The most sensible course would be to make a curtain in the tradition of Strzemiński’s Unism: the artistic community would appreciate it, the authorities would be pleased and it could safely be shown to primary-school excursions. Technically, it would be simple: all that would be required is to select a piece of canvas with the right dimensions and weave. Complete Unism. It is also difficult to call a sheet of grey canvas kitsch. And the colour is quintessentially Łódź. Perhaps that is what should be done? But why not do it differently?”