There Are Cracks in the World

Marek Szczęsny is an artist who has always followed his own path. He never completed a conventional art degree, attending only those classes at the State Higher School of Fine Arts in Gdańsk that he considered useful. Throughout this time he continued without interruption to paint, draw and design. On the basis of the works he had assembled and through the intervention of the distinguished painter Tadeusz Brzozowski, a Ministry of Culture commission ruled that Marek Szczęsny could be granted the status of a fully fledged artist, and he received a membership card from the Association of Polish Artists and Designers. He left the coast because, as he recalls, he could not endure the pressure of its milieu and way of life. He moved to Zakopane. For four years he climbed in the Tatra Mountains and worked actively with the Mountain Volunteer Search and Rescue service, while drawing a great deal. One day he understood Friedrich Nietzsche’s words that “the mountains are beyond good and evil” and gave up climbing. He managed — not without difficulties, which surprised no one at the time — to obtain a passport and left for Paris, where he eventually settled permanently. In France he moved for a while among Polish intellectuals, designing émigré publications. This was not, however, the path he wished to follow. He also missed contact with art of the highest order in that milieu. The time had come to turn towards and concentrate upon his own work. Yet he did not abandon his artistic travels through France, Europe and America. Inexhaustible energy continues to propel him forward, towards the unknown concealed in the outside world and, no less, within himself.

Marek Szczęsny draws and paints on paper and canvas. He also places other materials upon them — wood, sheet metal — thereby breaking the uniformity of the basic painterly support. He assembles the world from fragments, seeks synthesis and attempts to grasp meaning in an imperfect whole. One can also view this from the opposite direction and assume that the artist is fragmenting a homogeneous material. He tears paper, then glues it back together, joining planes that do not quite fit; indeed, he would not wish them to meet perfectly and without gaps. He destroys what he finds and reconstructs an order that has become lost “amid all this clamour”. He rejects the constitution of this world precisely in order to create it anew, without concealing its contradictions and imperfections. He does not pretend that a perfect image can be created. He puts himself to the test, because in confronting the plane of canvas or paper he works intuitively, following an impulse he cannot resist. This impulse does not appear without cause: behind it stand profound thoughts, experiences and accumulated impressions that must find release.

The artist feels a need to destroy form, but does so in order subsequently to rebuild the structure that no longer exists. Deconstruction in the service of construction; a revaluation that purifies and restores our humanity. This is no speculative activity. It is the instinct for life, a struggle for survival in the human sense. As in every struggle, moments of doubt about the purpose of the challenge arise, along with unsuccessful attempts to escape an impasse. Marek Szczęsny does not defend himself against failure. It does not trouble him if two or three unsuccessful paintings are made. The artist knows that this too serves a purpose. If something “doesn’t work”, that is good as well. “You have to fall so that you can then rise and create something with strength.”

The artist struggles boldly with his material, painting with a decisive and forceful gesture. Drama emanates from works that often contain no recognisable figurative elements, arising from collisions between planes, patches, lines, textures and materials. He does not shrink from destroying matter, which simultaneously destroys particular ideas. This produces tension, an immanent quality of art that refuses to let the viewer remain indifferent to the image. At the same time, the modesty and simplicity of this painting are captivating, intensifying its impact. What is left unsaid opens us to a multiplicity of interpretations. Mystery is a quality of art that allows viewers to liberate their own imagination and thereby participate in creating the work before which they stand. A restrained palette produces clarity: usually the grey or white of paper or canvas, white and black paint… sometimes blue appears, sometimes red, sometimes green.

Marek Szczęsny’s works enter space. We encounter the picture plane, beyond which stretches an infinity, an unrestricted realm where no limitations exist other than those imposed by our capacity to see. The artist does not enclose his pictures within frames. He does not respect the confines of a two-dimensional rectangle or submit to the rigours of a paper or canvas format. Marek Szczęsny stands before the unpainted image to confront the physicality of the plane of canvas or paper.

On one side are the artist and his honesty; on the other, immediately before him, the plane on which the image will arise. Entering space occurs on a human scale, because this determinant of our physicality cannot be ignored.

The viewer is placed in the same situation. The artist gives us the opportunity for direct, tangible contact with what he creates. There are ourselves, the image and an opening towards what we may find “on the other side of the looking-glass”.

It is exceptionally important to this artist not to revisit the same questions in successive works. He considers it uncreative and sees no reason to explore again problems that have been defined, considered and resolved — or abandoned because they lead nowhere. Success can simultaneously become a trap for the artist. If particular works are well received, the temptation arises to continue along the same path, often ending in the empty reproduction of formal solutions. The obvious explanation for repetition in art is what indulgent critics call consistency within an artist’s work… By virtue of the particular constitution of a human being, Marek Szczęsny’s works cannot be, and are not, detached from one another. Yet this is merely a formal matter, because the artist cannot bear to reproduce the same thought organising the image. Painting an intense patch and deciding that it worked will not cause him to repeat it. That patch exists somewhere within the artist, but the configuration in which it appears changes each time. It is transformed not only through thought but also through the movement of the hand. Characteristic forms, materials, a particular palette and a recognisable painterly gesture appear in his images: lines dividing the plane; the drama created by combining figurative elements; whole human figures painted sketchily, often from behind; faceless heads; faces half concealed; patches of surrounding colour; and a horizon line that does not always run gently or naturally. As he himself says: “The most important things in my art are the emotions I put into the works. The plane must contain certain tensions. Something unexpected suddenly appears, a form that assists the directional tensions. A creative impulse emerges. You paint, look and see a world beginning to appear. You search for the form you lack. It is something completely uncontrolled. You wonder why an element appears here rather than there. You look and add another element, and then the final decision is made. I have often observed, with the works on paper again, that sometimes I begin cold and rigid, then enter a certain freedom. This too comes from my past, from the period when I made many graphic works. Sometimes it is difficult to feel such freedom in using a tool, the freedom to decide upon a colour, to negate, to feel absolutely free on the plane.” The drama that emerges while working on an image matters to him: it arises from the relations among the elements appearing on the plane, from the unease of searching. He is not drawn to works that are too austere, but neither does he like those that are “laboured”, “overworked”, brought to the point at which the freshness of decisions disappears. What matters is capturing the moment at which to stop. The works on paper and their ascetic forms — the highly cultivated use of this material — invite associations with Japanese art. His work is greatly appreciated there too, and it is an art he holds in exceptionally high regard.

Marek Szczęsny is the “eternal outsider”, searching for himself and his place. He hides from the world while wishing to be present within it. At every stage of life he is at home and with himself, yet simultaneously apart from what surrounds him. On one hand his pictures contain directness, decisiveness and clarity; on the other, anonymity and indeterminacy. This has led him to combine forms of expressive abstraction with figurative elements. Abstract elements, lines and planes contain particles of real existence; representational elements — a human silhouette or head — are abstracted from reality through the absence of detail, especially since they are reduced to a minimum in the way they are painted. Heads are often shown from behind or in profile, deprived of faces, concealed in shadow or half covered with paint. It is difficult to resist the impression that these are incomplete, transparent self-portraits. The artist simultaneously reveals his world to us and conceals it from our eyes. Naturally, every artist’s work contains a biographical line, either in the foreground or carefully camouflaged and pushed as far as possible from view. Marek Szczęsny’s works are not autobiographical in a literal sense, although it is difficult to deny that the Emigrants series directly evokes his own path through life and the consequences of his decision to leave his country and the milieu in which he had lived. Being an emigrant in both the literal and figurative senses is certainly a condition he knows well. Marek Szczęsny is an artist who lends biographical themes universal meaning. He carries his personal experiences into his work and marks within it the limitations and conditions encountered by human beings.

It is November 2015 and we are discussing the exhibition planned for January 2016 at Atlas Sztuki in Łódź. The work is to be made on site, within the exhibition space. It will be a twelve- to fifteen-metre plane of white paper, subjected to tearing and then the attachment of papers that have been torn and are falling. By attempting a certain destruction of what he calls this magnificent material, the artist wants to show how he thinks about the world in real terms. “One can begin with an assumption like this: we take a sheet of paper and want to write something — to describe, for example, how the day went, whom we met, what happened and what reflections came to us. It is a kind of record of reality, a way of thinking about the world. That is how I treat it… so I make a composition of this kind. Naturally I leave a certain space, a mental space, for chance, for the unknown. I find that easier, but what fascinates me about painting is that laying down a patch or drawing several lines is not enough; one has to find another form, to break it, strengthen it, say something more. Then begins the search for what that form should be, because there are a thousand or five thousand possibilities — or even more — and that is enormously interesting.” In preparing for the exhibition, the artist is making a series of small-format sketches so that, during several days’ work within the Atlas Sztuki gallery, he can transfer them to a large plane of paper suspended on one wall. He plans to place a much smaller work on the adjoining wall. Everything else will depend on the viewer. Light may penetrate through the cracks in this world and, as Marek Szczęsny says, “What lies beyond the control of our thought is true.”

*Małgorzata Sady is active in several creative fields, working with text, sound and image: she writes, paints, translates, photographs, makes films and creates sound spaces. She has translated numerous works on art, literature — including Czechowicz and Themerson — and philosophy, including Russell and Wittgenstein. Since the late 1970s she has collaborated with art venues in Poland and abroad as a curator and artist. She researches the work of Stefan and Franciszka Themerson and collaborates with Koji Kamoji and the Quay Brothers.