Reality Is Flat

Klein "drawed out all the parabolic lines on the sculpture of Apollo Belvedere, whose features are characterized by a high degree of classical beauty. These curves, however, do not have a simple shape and it was impossible to find a general law to which they would be subject" (D. Hilbert and S. Cohn-Vossen Illustrative geometry, trans. A. Dawidowicz, Warsaw 1956, p. 183-184). The authors also write that: "The invariance of the Gaussian curvature during bending therefore follows that it is impossible to apply a flat piece of paper to a slap of a surface with a positive or negative curvature. Experience teaches that in the first case the paper folds, in the second it tears". Man is physically bounded by a surface that "contains both points of positive curvature and points of negative Gaussian curvature" (p. 183, down). Mathematics, as we know today, still has a lot to discover before it becomes a tool that can describe and protect what is alive (Βίος, ζωή, vita). The only one that seemed to cope with this was supposed to be photography (advertising).

One of the first to ironically refer to this illusion (advertising photography) was Zbigniew Libera. He titled his "process work" The reality is flat, in which, as Bożena Czubak suggested at the Libera exhibition in Atlas Sztuki, one can see a parallel to the concept of the French writer, screenwriter and precursor Nouveau roman Alain Robbe-Grilleta. He considered the "flattening" vision to be one of the rudiments of the modernist condition, the antithesis of the traditional, pre-modernist understanding of depth. Whatever it was, it was also the starting point of Libera's work, which wanted to show the truth of the theory of flat reality. For this purpose, he uses not so much a car as a canonical product of modernist culture, but its image. Reality is flat, says Libera, because we see it mediated by an image that stereotypes the vision.

And if so, what happens when you attempt to restitute this image into a three-dimensional reality that is at the source of the flat image? And how will this restored reality look? In other words: what will be the result of such a hyperconstructivist conversion?

Born in 1959 in Pabianice, the artist seems to be the only one today who is able to cope with the flat development of the urban plan Łódź and turn it into a beautiful, vibrant real reality. Atlas Sztuki was always in good deals with Zbyszek. Two exhibitions oblige...