In Conversation with Piotr Naliwajko

Krzysztof Cichoń: Where did the exhibition title Only Great Paintings come from? Are we to understand “great” in a tailor’s sense, measured in centimetres?

Piotr Naliwajko: That too, but not only that. If you set about painting, you should do it in such a way that the painting is great. It does not always work, but you have to try. This is the result of the mutilation of Polish painting by Matejko; it was he who imposed great paintings. Great and painful. If a painting does not hurt, it is not very interesting.

K.C.: Can you not stop teasing the admirers of your technique? What if you painted nothing but beautiful, pure pictures, without puzzles, allusions and references to things that will always provoke people? The difficulty is that you insist on doing this through traditional painting. I once heard Zbigniew Libera—an authority on provocative art who, unlike you, receives excellent press—say that he had nothing against painting pictures, but that it was an entirely unsuitable medium for art based on play and provocation. There is no denying that the overwhelming majority of people who write and comment on art share this view. Can you not give up one or the other: perversity and provocation, or oil paint and realism?

P.N.: I would sooner give up the last of those, although I have no plans to do so for now. When you practise an art that takes quite a long time to make and try to provoke a response from someone, it cannot be trivial; you have to reach for very serious subjects. I do not know whether I succeed, but I know I must refer to something that will not have time to change while the painting is being made.

K.C.: How many paintings separate you from the Tercet Nadęty?

P.N.: Most of them. Three quarters of the paintings I have made have nothing to do with the Trio. For a long time I tried to distance myself from all that “trio business”, because people thought our paintings were very similar. It was becoming dangerous. People began to treat us as a collective statement. Of course, the paintings sometimes shared certain iconographic or formal similarities. I devised, for example, the red circle above Christ’s head in The Arrival of Christ in Chorzów. It came about because I had originally intended to paint a bent golden halo. I knew that gilding was best underpainted in green or red. I painted this uneven, bent circle in red and then walked around the painting for two months, because I liked that unfinished red halo so much. Finally, I drew the circle with a compass and filled it with paint. Later it was used many times in other paintings, not only by me but by my colleagues as well. It became a sign of the Trio: the halos were not gold, but rendered in very hot colours.

K.C.: I am looking at Idol, in which every figure has a red halo.

P.N.: Later I treated it as my trademark. I wanted to humanise Christ; I saw him more as a man than as God. With a red halo, to me he was more suffering and more love—in other words, simply blood. That is why such halos began to appear. The same was true of the cows, which one of us began painting at some point, though no one knows who. Because of these similarities in motif, people began lumping all our paintings together. It became dangerous, because each of us had different reasons for painting. Those who wrote about art stopped asking even which of us painted the more interesting pictures, and began treating what we did as a collective statement. It seemed completely unhealthy to me, so as soon as I could escape from the Trio, I did. To return to your question—how many paintings separate me from it? Most of the important ones.

K.C.: How many paintings have you made altogether?

P.N.: It is difficult to say, because if we count the landscapes I painted serially as paintings, we will never finish counting…

K.C.: Then without the landscapes…

P.N.: Forgive me, but I am not going to dismiss those landscapes. After all, some painters paint nothing but landscapes and are great artists…

K.C.: Yes, but you once said that as soon as you could, you began making “real paintings”—that is, paintings containing people…

P.N.: I have always painted people; I just did not always know that anyone would want to live with them. Landscape does appear in my paintings, however, and often—at least as staffage, as a kind of opening onto normality. What happens in my paintings in front of the window is sick, while what lies beyond the window is more normal. So I do not flee from landscape. To return to the number of paintings, if we count without the landscapes, it must be well over a thousand. I once counted all the paintings made from the beginning of my studies to the end of the 1980s, and arrived at seven hundred. Assuming a certain annual average, the total is well over a thousand. I cannot tell you exactly how many, because I simply do not like counting my paintings.

K.C.: You could probably live perfectly well by painting half as many. Since this is not simply a compulsion to work, what drives you to come to the studio day after day—even today, which happens to be Sunday? Some reflex? Or have you still not painted what you wanted to paint?

P.N.: The last of those is probably closest to the truth. In order to do anything, to exist, alongside the paintings one makes to sell, one has to paint some pictures to show. You said one “could live well”—of course, but one has to realise that unless a painter is immediately taken on by an excellent gallery or has financial backing, which I never had, he must do everything with his own money. I first had to earn enough to exhibit somewhere. As a rule, I tried not to be financially dependent on anyone; I tried not to ask for money for a catalogue or transport. Of course I could have painted slightly fewer pictures, but I am convinced that, up to a certain point, quality is a function of quantity. Now I paint less, and certainly with longer intervals. Contrary to what you say about sitting in the studio every day, that is not quite how it looks. You can sit there and produce nothing. I know this because I also deal with the technical side: I prime everything and prepare everything myself. I like doing it myself; it makes me feel more secure. I feel I have put so much work into sanding the ground that I simply cannot ruin it. And then I make an effort.

K.C.: What is this business with four colours? Have you always used four?

P.N.: Ever since I read in Maria Rzepińska’s History of Colour that Titian used four during his finest period, and that Tintoretto did not make a great fuss about the number of colours either. Those two painters have always appealed to me. Titian said he could paint a nude with three colours. I decided that if he could do it with three, I could paint anything with four. I generally use four colours. Occasionally, though very rarely, I use an additional one, because I know that ochre will not give me a venomous yellow, and I need it symbolically in a painting. Or—as happened three, perhaps four times, including in The Arrival of Christ in Chorzów—I use a most peculiar green, with which I perform various miracles. I will not say what they are, because then people will start painting like that. It is a green that makes something extraordinary happen to the light, makes it cadaverous. I do this in certain paintings, but even within those pictures there are never more than four colours. Five in exceptional cases. As a general rule, there is something from which one can make red, something pretending to be yellow, and black and white. Essentially, I am working towards painting a picture with black and white alone. Everyone thinks it is so simple: take white and black and paint—paint like old Hals. That is all nonsense; one has to mature into it. You may never mature into it, but it has to be conscious. You cannot simply pick up a brush and daub something. You have to know why you are using those colours, what they mean to the painting and to you. That is why it is so obvious that every painter attempts to individualise their palette.

K.C.: You have surprised me slightly with this black and white, because it seems that one day you will meet Malevich, who went one better and used a single colour.

P.N.: Excuse me, he painted it once; he did not exactly overwork himself…

K.C.: Not much, no, but he succeeded…

P.N.: There has to be a pretext, an image from which I can begin painting in black and white. It certainly will not be like Malevich, regardless of whether it is an abstract painting or not. But the black and white must be rich enough to replace the entire riot of colours that fills the world. The point is to have the greatest possible command of one’s technique. So many things escape our control while painting that, even if I could paint in black and white, the margin of freedom—the scope for the painting itself to act—is so vast that it is difficult to control.

K.C.: What did art school give you in terms of technique?

P.N.: I attended a school that did not teach painting, but did teach printmaking. I may have been the weakest printmaker there, but I knew a great deal about technique by then. When it came to painting, basically no one knew anything, and if they did, they did not say. I read a number of purely technical books about what could and could not be mixed, and looked at paintings by artists I admired. On that basis, I developed what is called technique.

K.C.: Rumour has it that you are going to paint a theatre curtain. Have you had any other unusual commissions?

P.N.: I have had a few unusual commissions, but did not accept them. I even wanted to take on a huge painting depicting the apotheosis of the Polish uhlans during the Polish–Soviet War of 1920. I was intrigued by the idea of beautifully painting a whole mass of men on horseback. I think I am afraid of horses; I have never seen one up close and have generally observed them from a distance. I would be frightened of such large animals. My idea was that, if I painted those uhlans, they would form a wave surging in and leaping over the trench in which I was standing—from that perspective. It would be a multiplied version of the effect in Chełmoński’s 1881 painting Four-in-Hand: Across the Steppe. Since it was intended to be the size of The Battle of Grunwald, there were certain possibilities. I believe there were differences between me and the person interested in the painting. What they wanted was something that would glorify Polish arms, and I am simply not suited to that.

K.C.: What a pity—that abortive romance with battle painting. Perhaps the Iraq campaign…

P.N.: I do not think it is entirely a lost cause, but it is very difficult to persuade oneself to devote time to a painting that may fail. Above all, you need your own financial backing, because by now I know it certainly cannot be a commission. There are always expectations: the Marshal has to be painted, then the colonels. It would not necessarily have anything to do with what I wanted to paint. It cannot be done that way.

K.C.: Do you not think that art itself could be added to the subjects you mentioned—subjects capable of provoking the broadest, almost existential questions, because they can arise in every viewer? Compared with religious motifs, references to and puzzles assembled from other paintings appear relatively rarely in your work, as in Cubism Is Cheerful, for example.

P.N.: Well, unfortunately, I think such puzzles would be completely incomprehensible to the average viewer. I love Picasso. He was the man who, with a single thrust of a penknife, slaughtered all the European painting I adore. A worthy opponent. In my view, Cubism was absorbed by popular culture very quickly. Old cartoons such as The Jetsons look like amusing paraphrases of Cubism.

K.C.: Have you experienced at first hand that figurative, realistic painting is aesthetically improper?

P.N.: Of course. I experienced it from the very beginning of my studies.

K.C.: Do you have a theory as to why? Is it some Polish speciality? A trauma left by totalitarian art?

P.N.: No, it is not a Polish speciality. I suspect it has something to do with art historians, because you mainly learn German and read German texts. The trauma is in Germany, and it concerns not Socialist Realism but National Socialist realism. Germans resist it tooth and nail. That perspective becomes established easily, because one reads those texts mainly when young, and they subsequently shape how one writes about art. I see nothing wrong with it. Once, people had to fight for the right to paint abstract pictures; now someone else has to fight for the right to paint a few horses—usually badly, incidentally.

K.C.: Technique is one thing, but there is also subject matter. Why do you always return to religious motifs? What do you need religion for—all those Last Suppers, Judgements, Mary Magdalenes and Pilates… It surely cannot all come from piety. Might it be that you enjoy “wrestling” with people? Religion is a good subject for starting an argument.

P.N.: Let us not exaggerate. These were motifs that aroused some emotion when they were shown. Let us be honest: we counted on the censors coming and taking something down. We were young, after all. I am not particularly interested in religion, but I am interested in its human element—why certain subjects seem dangerous or shocking to people. The point is to place a person on the edge and force them to think. That is why I took such paintings onto the streets of Silesian cities, something reflected twice in films: one from 1989 devoted to the Trio and another about me from 1999. There are several subjects that compel thought. One is sex or eroticism. It is very easy to descend into banality. Another is death, but fortunately I know little about it. I think that once I know something, I will address it. I am not saying I have never touched on these subjects, but I know too little and would simply treat them too superficially. Being entangled in a cultural context, which is determined above all by the religious circle in which one was raised, is a fairly secure subject for me. That is why I use those motifs. It is all a balancing act on the boundary. Take Idol: remove those red circles, give the painting a different title, and they may turn out to be shipyard workers. While I was making the painting, friends came to visit and interpreted it in different ways. Their ideas ranged from a strike or some kind of vote to the suggestion that the man at the top had won the qualifying round of Idol. Religious interpretations were the least common; almost no one read the arrangement of figures as a play on an icon. The best response came from the children in an art club, who said the men in the painting were holding red jellies in their hands. So it seems to me that these paintings become religious because someone looks at them that way. I am very sorry, but that is not my fault. I am, of course, playing within a certain field of meanings, but someone who is not oriented in that direction may interpret it completely differently. Religion is therefore a strange element in my paintings, but it is also a strange element in the lives of Poles and of everyone raised in a culturally homogeneous country.

K.C.: What would you do if you could not paint?

P.N.: I do not know; I have never even tried to think about it. I would like to be the kind of composer who disturbs no one, who sits in a church or somewhere and gets on with his work—like Bach. Not a musician, but a composer, grasping that abstract form. My sketches for paintings begin with an abstract construction onto which I later place figures, landscape and certain meanings. It is the reverse of Mondrian’s path. My figures thrust themselves forwards from the surface of the painting, as though annexing the space in front of the canvas, which connects me with Matejko’s way of composing rather than, for example, Aleksander Gierymski’s, whose paintings extend into depth as though we were looking into them. I could not do other things, such as write. There are so many words and one has to tell stories, while fundamentally I do not like telling stories.

K.C.: Let us now speak seriously about value in art. The highest price achieved by one of your paintings was…

P.N.: There is a problem, because I learn such things from the press, sometimes the foreign press. I know that paintings were sold for around 50,000 dollars—Self-Portrait with a Guardian Angel, for example—and I also heard of something like 75,000 for Bird of Paradise. But unfortunately these are gallery prices, not mine. All those sums, fascinating to a Polish painter, are pathetic compared with the prices commanded by fashionable painters in New York or by people painting little blue dolphins in California. In reality, they are isolated cases. Many galleries sell or have sold my paintings, but I have none that would undertake genuine promotion, because it is fiendishly expensive. These are still guerrilla operations.

K.C.: Since we are discussing things in art that can be counted, what about attendance at your exhibitions? Has it already peaked? Is the trend falling, rising or constant?

P.N.: I think my personal world record was in Zandvoort, a small seaside resort in the Netherlands. A circus tent was put up for me on the Saturday, and the exhibition lasted only a few hours, from noon until six the next day. More than ten thousand people came. That is my personal world record and I doubt it will be broken soon. Of course, no one had to buy tickets, and the town had no other attractions apart from the sea and the Formula One circuit, but still… I am not counting my presentations at the International Art Expo in New York, which is visited by tens of thousands of people. In Poland, on several occasions when we were still exhibiting as the Trio, attendance reached more than ten thousand during the two or three weeks of an exhibition. We never complained about a lack of viewers. What we did complain about was the lack of any reasonably objective assessment of what we were doing, or what I now do alone. In Poland, we have yet to receive such an assessment, and I suspect we never will. A certain burden, I think, is that as Duda-Gracz’s students we were simultaneously labelled his imitators. The Trio was once regarded as a kind of visual cabaret, and for a time we did not distance ourselves from that, because it gave us greater freedom.

K.C.: Did the recurring presence of dolls in your paintings begin with Barbie as the Madonna?

P.N.: Perhaps it began with that painting, or perhaps because I had previously painted The Three Graces with three dolls. It all began with my daughter, who still occasionally buys herself a doll with her own money, and from time to time I steal one from her and paint it.

K.C.: Let us return to technical proficiency and facility in painting. Might it be that non-figurative art—the avant-gardism taught in every school for decades—has caused someone who is technically proficient and paints with ease to be associated with craft, with something specifically “technical”, and therefore easily assumed to be artisanal and inferior to art? Something associated with a handyman, a capable tradesman who can paint both a horse and a woman, but is not, after all, an artist?

P.N.: It is strange that this happens only in painting. If an actor turned out to be hopeless, you simply would not go to see the film. It is the same with musicians: if someone wheezes at you, you will not listen.

K.C.: Let us talk about setting. Most of your phantasmagorias take place in the yard outside the studio window. There is a very emphatically visible wall of bricks coated in bluish paint. What about the bricks—how many are there? Do you paint every one?

P.N.: I have already counted them. Painting those bricks is exceptionally laborious and difficult. The perspective changes depending on which window I look through. That is what I struggle with most while drawing out a painting. But I am convinced that if I spoil something like that, something so obvious that everyone can relate to it, the painting loses something—something elusive.

K.C.: How long did you wait for rain to fall so that the roofing felt above which Primavera crouches would gleam with moisture?

P.N.: I never saw it happen…

K.C.: So you do make things up in your paintings after all…

P.N.: I began in September. It had to rain in the afternoon and then the sun had to come out. The sun could not shine directly, because everything would have turned yellowish; it had to shine through the clouds at a particular angle onto a red wall, which then had to be reflected in the roofing felt. To tell the truth, it happened three times from September onwards, and the painting is large, so there was quite a bit of work. None of it is simple. If I begin a figure before noon, I do not paint it later in the afternoon, because the contrast is completely different.

K.C.: Now for privacy. Private stories unfold in many of your paintings, and you paint figures of relatives and friends. The appearance of privacy in the picture marks an important watershed in the history of academic painting. Since you object to Malczewski always making everything about himself…

P.N.: I have been wrestling with little Jacek for years, ever since I painted him without his trousers. He could have done more; he did less. I am deeply convinced of it. And I am afraid that one day, years from now, some idiot like me will come along and paint me that way. Although I can paint myself without trousers. I am afraid someone will one day say of me: he could have done more; he did less.

K.C.: To return to the models: either the same faces can be recognised in your paintings because you are simply accustomed to painting from a model, or they serve to play out entirely private stories and subtexts. I am looking at Delilah and know that it is an entirely private painting…

P.N.: Why does one paint? Let us start at the beginning. Why does one paint? That is where all the privacy comes from. You paint so that everyone will love you; you paint and believe that everyone will love you for it. Fundamentally, you want them to love you simply because you exist, but you fear that is not enough, so you have to do something—become a hero or paint beautifully. At a certain point that ceases to be enough, and you already know that not everyone will love you anyway. This makes life easier. Once you know it, you paint for those who do love you. And that is the simplest thing.

K.C.: I ask every living artist, so I will ask you as well: should an artist read?

P.N.: I do not know; it is difficult to say. An artist who practises critical art should probably at least read Gazeta to know what is what. I myself cannot really name my sources of inspiration.

K.C.: Would you say something about the Diptych of the Michelangelos?

P.N.: It is dedicated to Mel.

K.C.: To whom?

P.N.: Mel. The one who made The Passion of the Christ. I have the impression that Mel Gibson wanted to be a Michelangelo. The third, after Buonarroti and Caravaggio. Those two—really the three of them with Titian—invented European painting after Giotto. Each in his own way reached the zenith. I thought that Mel Gibson, with his Passion—of course I have not seen it, but speaking of reading, I have read a great deal about it—also wanted to be a Michelangelo. That is why I dedicated the diptych to him. In this case, I suspect, elements of sophisticated, aesthetically refined popular culture can lead one into some dreadful kitsch. I do not know whether he fell into such kitsch, because I have not seen the film, but I imagine the danger exists. On the other hand, there is that man (Wim Delvoye—editor’s note) who exhibits a machine for producing shit: food goes in at one end and shit comes out of the other. I thought one could reverse the process. Those objects, those dolls visible in the diptych, are fundamentally shit—worthless stuff—and the challenge is to make a work of art from it. I do not know whether I will succeed, but it seems the greater challenge.

K.C.: So we have ended close to Kantor and his idea that reaching for poor materials, something from the lowest rank of reality, supplies a magic ticket into art. We spoke about Frans Hals’s Regentesses of the Old Men’s Almshouse. Are there any other paintings from which, as you said, “nothing more can be learned”, yet which arrest a person?

P.N.: They remain within a person. You know there are not many. Aleksander Gierymski—after many years I can see that he was an excellent painter. Of all Polish painters, I esteem him most highly. Not to mention Matejko, because he invented and simultaneously mutilated Polish painting. He mutilated it by placing his stamp upon it and setting such impossibly high standards. He damaged quite a few people: Wyspiański, and Malczewski too—an outstanding talent, yet somehow unable to meet them. Matejko reached the heights of expression attainable in painting, not necessarily in a positive sense. Then there is the compelling van Gogh in his self-portrait at the museum in Amsterdam.

K.C.: Is there anyone in Polish art after 1945 who has been forgotten or insufficiently appreciated?

P.N.: Among those who are dead, I assume. I am not going to advertise the living; I have a good heart, but there are limits. I was very fond of Jonasz Stern. It seemed completely honest to me, if honesty is any kind of value in art. He was so likeable, wanted nothing at all, and at the same time made beautiful paintings.