Still Life With A Chessboard

Still Life With A Chessboard is Slawomir Pawszak's first exhibition held with Pola Magnetyczne Galery

Since the end of the 15th century easel painting has approached the rectangle of canvas as an equivalent of a window view - a three-dimensional illusory space that is constructed along the rules of perspective. At the beginning of the 20th c. the painters broke with the necessity of such illusory representation by introducing the solutions that stressed the plane of the painting and its materiality. The umbilical cord with the world has been cut in this manner, and a painting has gained its autonomous existence. Like a tile removed from a wall, it has become an object among other objects.

In his most recent paintings, Sławomir Pawszak assumes that, during the digital revolution, the window in the wall has been replaced by a digital window of a computer, tablet or smartphone. This change recalls a number of issues which, one could have thought, have already been exhausted throughout the history of painting. However, mutatis mutandis, still life with a chessboard has become more relevant, or rather it has updated.

What about illusory space in the time of simulated space and immersion environment then? What about the detail in the time of touchscreens, which give us the possibility of an almost free magnification of images - what then with the eye-hand relationship? What about the depth, the foreground, the background of the screens' plane? Finally, what about the horizon line, when we bend over the screens? Are these the matters of image analysis? Not only, especially if we take into consideration that different types of composition of the paintings usually aimed at something - for Courbet it was to express the burden of things, for Cezanne - to touch the horizon with one's eyes, for Bracque - to show the space between objects, etc. How is fleetingness approached today, when the images of the world disappear from social media within the span of seconds? And what with the visible and the invisible, when there is a constant expansion of code lines behind the graphic interfaces.

As Stéphane Vial, a French philosopher, writes, technologies are not only tools; they are also structures of perception. It is them that condition the manner in which the world and its phenomena manifest themselves to us. Like blood circulating in the system, digital material culture flows through all spheres of our life today. It is like a mold which is filled with our perception, and which gives new characteristics to the reality experienced by us - the features which shaped the new manner of sensing the world - light, fluid, resistance-free, at least until the battery is low or the connection is lost. Our new umbilical cord with the world is the electricity cable.

It is not an easy challenge to present and express quality changes which have already taken place and are ongoing. The more so that they happen within us, in our psyche, in our body, that is in the space of cognitive processes, our memory, but also fantasies, desires and fears.

The basics of Pawszak’s visual code connect different orders: what is rational and measured, such as check or geometric solid figures of a sphere or cube, is being combined with organic forms, which can be associated with soft body parts, sexual organs. In the picture composed of a chess board and bars resembling bathroom tiles, we observe a mysterious and intimate scene. It is an erotic vivisection of something we recognize but which we do not fully know. Pawszak’s spaces often operate with illusion. The chess board from one painting does not have converging lines; it is isometric. We do allow ourselves to be taken in, as our eye has been taught to recognize the form of a perspective chessboard. Similarly we have been taught that virtual equals unreal, and not simulation - as a consequence we have forgotten that the opposite of virtual is actual. A person that closes one’s eyes does not become blind, but can see virtually. It is enough to lift the eyelids to update one’s sight.

The spaces of the Warsaw artist can be described as thin, epidermal. The paint on the surface of the painting has been smushed right beneath and right on the drawing of the bars, leaving as if a trace of lines crossing - like a smear of a finger left on a black screen. Something was there, passed, is embedded in us like dust on a floor. To describe Pawszak’s works one could use Duchamp’s category of infra-thin, an example of which might be the warmth that a person leaves on a chair when getting up. It is an ephemeral phenomenon on the border of perception, a nuance: something that we can perceive but which does not reach our consciousness.

The historical events that we are living through today, which prove the return of conservative powers and barbarian instincts, evoke a sense of humanity being stuck in one place all the time. In this context the digital revolution, being the most powerful revolution that humanity experienced, as it is referring to the very act of perception, carries an optimistic message. It reminds that human nature is not like still life - petrified but evolutionary, and capable of adaptation, albeit incidentally.

At the end of the 1990s Deep Blue, a supercomputer, won a few chessgames with Garri Kasparov, a chessmaster. It has not yet been observed, however, for a computer to create a masterpiece.

Patrick Komorowski

Amalgamate (interview)

Monika Čejková: Sławomir, could you tell me when and how you decided to focus on painting?

Sławomir Pawszak:  I made a conscious decision in choosing painting as a medium at the third year of my studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. When I was taking my entrance exams, I didn’t know much about contemporary art. I decided to choose the Painting Department mainly because for over a dozen years, I had been attending painting classes at the Palace of Culture in Warsaw. For my parents this was an affordable way to organise some after-school activities for me. I started when I was eight, and this led painting to become a straightforward and obvious way of expression for me. It wasn’t until later, in college, that I started to consider painting as my medium of choice. I was extremely lucky because at the beginning of the studies, I met a group of people who were already fascinated by contemporary art and my own interest in it came about thanks to them.

In the second half of the twentieth century Poland saw a strong and progressive art scene formed. Did you have any local heroes or heroines from this era at the time of your studies?

I must say that we all admired Wilhelm Sasnal, Paweł Althamer, Monika Sosnowska and, later, Jakub Julian Ziółkowski – generally, the artists associated with the Foksal Gallery Foundation. Sasnal managed to squeeze something out of the medium of painting itself. He built his lexicon from a set of painterly gestures that may have seemed worn and compromised, but once they were exposed and embedded in a different context, they gained a new strength. We thought that they were some of the most interesting artists in the world. At that time, we had already gone to see exhibitions all over Europe, we had been at the Venice Biennale, Documents in Kassel and the Munster Sculpture Project, so we had some awareness of what was going on and so, our perspective was not completely unfounded. In Munster, Althamer's work was a path he had trodden through the city‘s park. We really enjoyed this work.

Today, I still believe that Poland has a unique accumulation of talented artists debuting in the ‘90s and 2000s. When I was studying in Poland, critical and socially engaged art was the most popular. We naturally rebounded from it straight in the opposite direction because at that moment, it already felt like academism for us. At that time, many works were created, seemingly meaningful in their theory and carrying significant social weight but in reality, stupid, trivial rebuttals, such as the work by Joanna Rajkowska, titled Painkillers, that featured replicas of machine guns made of powdered painkillers.
It was obvious that art institutions were focused on critical art. So, following the saying: Na złość tacie nasram w gacie (I will shit my pants to make my dad angry), we wanted to do art that was not tied to any aspirations to fix the world, but focussed on art in itself. This was not due to ignorance but, on the contrary, it came from the great interest and over stimulation afforded to us by the amount of contemporary art we had seen. We were reluctant to follow certain patterns of an artistic career and what were, in our view, the conformist attitudes of some artists. My colleagues from the studio just for fun came up with dozens of fictitious artists, supplied them with statements and fictitious artworks made on photoshop. For me, it was a jolt that made me turn to abstraction. At that moment I felt that in Poland abstraction was treated as something strange, a mistake that had entirely lost all value.

Could you introduce the Polish art scene – I mean mainly painting?

It seems to me that Poles love figurative art. Since the ‘90s, with a brief allowance for surreal painting, artists have been taking up the subject and the topic of everyday life in Poland. (Titles related to the problems of everyday life were presented in art in the ‘90s by: Wilhelm Sasnal, Marcin Maciejowski, Rafal Bujnowski (Group Ładnie) and Agata Bogacka. Today this subject is treated by: Karolina Jabłońska, Cyryl Polaczek and Tomasz Kręcicki (Potencja group). Humanity, oppression, some kind of contemporary version of ecce homo are all popular topics and the list of artists painting human figures in trouble is long. Abstraction in Poland is a marginal and marginalised phenomenon. At some point, Bogacka, Bujnowski, Małgorzta Szymankiewicz and Michał Budny began painting geometric compositions, very elegant, harmonised, modernist. It is probably only this type of abstraction that is digestible for the Polish audience.

You labelled the paintings for your graduation work as carefree tourists. Could you tell me more about that?

By this I meant a way of looking at reality, which I named; carefree tourist point of view. I wanted to propose a way of looking at reality that is in opposition to the regular, a way in which we absorb all of reality selflessly and thoughtlessly as a random abstract mass, without analysis, without taking world apart into elements according to categories of things. This view is contrary to our nature of a hunter-gatherer, which immediately tells us to sort the world into categories of usability or threat. We are used to looking for patterns in what we see, that's why two dots and a line will always be a face for us.

Do you still identify yourself with this term?

I do in a way. The main axis of what I do still remains a selfless look at reality. I am still interested in the option of going beyond the evolutionary pattern of seeing in us, what reality would look like from the perspective of the stone. A viewpoint that wouldn't put a human in the primary position but, rather, treat them as a part of the wide landscape. Art that would not be an ode to the image of a human, no longer focussed on the human portrait.
I would like my works to be treated in a way which is illustrated by the situation from the novel by the Strugacki Brothers, Picnic on the edge of the road (based on the film by Andriej Tarkovsky Stalker). An alien spaceship lands on Earth. The aliens fly away after a short time, leaving behind or losing things. People sneak into the place after landing and silently carry out the objects left by strangers. They are unable to understand their function or significance. They use the found artifacts for their purposes according to their intuition but not being aware of their true designation. I like to treat my works as such objects; not comprehensible at first glance but potentially useful in some different way at the same time.

As you source to your paintings everyday internet images I have to ask you what your relationship to photography in general is?

First of all, it's shocking how much time people spend every day looking at photos on social media, how much time a statistical human spends on interacting with the flat images moving across the screen. This is a puzzling problem for me as a painter. We live more than ever in the world of flat pictures. The amount of images and visual data that we absorb during one day exceeds today the number of images that the peasant at the medieval times saw during his entire life. The attitude towards this pressing mass of images is one of the topics I am interested in. I work using large collections of photos which I download from the Internet, then I group them into categories based on various topics which I think have a certain common denominator. It can be any feature or concept, such as heavy, swollen or falling, heat. When I have a set ready, I start painting a picture that will ultimately be a unified portrait for the whole group of photos. I want it to reflect what I feel as I look at all the selected photographs. What is presented in individual photos does not matter. It is some way to deal with the vast of images we are dealing with.

Another interesting issue related to photography is how it affected painting, and even more broadly, our way of looking at reality. What do you think?

We have learned to look at the world through a rectangle of photographic frame. The composition in painting has changed. In the Renaissance, nobody would paint half of the head. A large part of contemporary painting is taken up by painting a photography (Gerhard Richter, Luc Tuymans, Wilhelm Sasnal), both in terms of composition and the imitation of photographic effects. I am not interested in imitating photographs in the medium of painting. Instead, I try to follow its innate properties. Not by composing images to the edges of the frame but, rather, by fitting within them what I find necessary.

You make experiments with photographic techniques like photogram when covering the glass plate of the scanner with transparent colours and you interconnect them with paintings of enlarged elements of objects, stencils. I wonder if that’s a way for you to come to terms with the invention of photography which saturated the need to create an index of reality?

I did abstract photographs because I think it is a kind of gap. Of course, experiments with photography as a medium, with chemistry, film, and photographic paper are as old as photography, but very few artists explore this space in photography. Digital photography can be infinitely subjected to various boorish treatments on Photoshop, you can damage files, expose artefacts (graphic artefacts). Such treatments have become an element of post-Internet aesthetics; vaporwave, deep fried memes. Considering the number of photos taken per day, it is estimated that at some point in the early 2000s, as many photos were taken in that year as in entire history of photography thus far and taking photos seemed absolutely hopeless. I stopped taking pictures a dozen or so years ago. I just came to the conclusion that all possible situations and frames had already been photographed.

During the last decade at least three strong visual currents have emerged in painting endeavouring – Zombie Formalism, New Surrealism, Post-Digital Pop etc. – to reflect the power of the internet and presentation in virtual reality. And yet at the start of the twenty-first century, there was talk of the end of painting. So, it has been shown that the virtual world enriched painting. What do you think about that?

In painting, often the subject was anything that was available at hand, aside for a certain set of props; lute, skull etc. Painters were painting what was widely available. It is impossible to ignore the fact that we spend more and more time on the Internet scrolling through pictures. Obviously, online reality has become an important part of our lives and this is reflected in art. This is an interesting problem of how to relate through art to the huge sphere of visuality that is the Internet. But it is interesting why, despite the passage of years, virtual works are hardly sold, whether it’s computer graphics in the form of files or 3D sculptures. Perhaps the answer is the simplest: when I look at the monitor too long, my head starts to hurt. That never happened when I was looking at paintings. We are bodily beings. Until you can enter the network with a virtual body like, for example, in the Matrix, it will not have as much impact as reality. Take Louisa Gagliardi, who needs to print her computer graphics even though they are perfect for viewing on a computer because, unfortunately, no one would take them seriously in the context of the art market if they were just files.

Could you please introduce the concept of the tiles exhibited at BWA Warszawa Gallery?

I thought a lot about the surface of the painting and that we don't treat the painting as it really is, but, rather, as a flat surface. Sometimes I think of a painting as a very subtle relief. I used tiles because I want to show clearly that the work exists in a three-dimensional space, contrary simply serving as a flat representation of reality.

Amalgamate

Over the last two decades, various tendencies and experiments have appeared in the area of painting attempting to reflect the phenomenon of the internet, the existence of virtual reality, and social media. Together, these efforts have, in the end, put to rest the myth that painting as a medium has become outdated and extinct. Instead, new possibilities have opened up for painting, allowing it to physically disengage from the walls of the exhibition hall, expand into the environment of the internet, and even use the digital world as one of its creative instruments. From a historical viewpoint, this is another development in our relationship with paintings, which has undergone a transformation as a result of new technologies.

Although Sławomir Pawszak’s art practice remains traditional in its physical presence, such as painted canvases, stretched on frames or experiments with objects and installations suspended in the gallery, at the same time, it offers complex contemplation of the perception of the image and its role in our contemporary digitalized world, where it is impossible to ignore the increasing amount of time we spend looking at visual content on our monitors or smartphone displays. Pawszak comes to terms with the overproduction of digital images, and reacts to their flat and superficial nature as well as the visual sphere of the internet in general. He finds various images online, downloading and saving them into thematic folders to use as an endless source of second-hand visuals – with synthesis and various computer effects, he reworks them into his paintings. With a certain dose of scepticism and humour, he thus imprints onto his canvases the bizarreness of the images flooding the internet. At times his artworks may appear to balance on the verge of kitsch, but they also work with the internet as a serious platform and in particular bring to our attention the current consumer society existing on network interfaces. Pawszak’s artworks are thus a contemporary statement as well as an amalgamation of ideas about painting as a visualization of the many layers of human existence, including fantasies about an infinite universe currently originating in the virtual world.

In general, Pawszak’s paintings do not have titles, nor do they depict any external reality existing in a specified time and location. The meaning of his individual artworks is only given by the syntax of the whole oeuvre. One might even make the assertion, with only a slight degree of exaggeration, that all his works are variations on one painting, which is not an interpretation of the depicted reality but rather a slice of it. The individual paintings appear to us as sequences of an internally nonuniform world. As part of an overall mosaic, they preserve a particular order, but ultimately frame configurations of shapes that seem familiar to us. In this regard, the works indirectly touch upon certain aspects of the modernist experiments from the beginning of the twentieth century, for example in the way they cast doubt on the nature of the painting medium, deconstruct form and space, and liberate colour from its dependence on the object – all of this in confrontation with the two-dimensional surface of the pictorial plane.

The exhibition Amalgamate at BWA Gallery will not only focus on Pawszak’s new paintings, but will also present his identically themed ceramic objects on the façade of the MDM urbanist complex on Marszałkowska street in Warsaw. The installation is inspired by the ceramic reliefs installed at high-rise housing estates under Socialism in the former Eastern Bloc.

Monika Čejková

Laniakea

At his first solo exhibition at the Foksal Gallery, Sławomir Pawszak will be showing new works created on photographic paper.

Photography derives its name from the Greek for ‘light’ and ‘drawing’ combined to mean ‘drawing with light’. Nowadays, semantically speaking, it refers to the lasting documentation of an image by means of light and the use of a wide range of techniques. In general, the birth of photography is accepted as having occurred in the nineteenth century, with Louis Jacques Dageure as the obstetrician. Not without reservations, of course, because the history of photography points to numerous examples of the use of light to develop images in earlier eras, while a great many scholars place the genesis of the camera obscura in Ancient Greece.

From the perspective of art, the invention of photography was of profound significance. On the one hand, in freeing artists from the task of mimetically copying reality, it was a crucial wellspring for the Great Avant-Garde trends which emerged in the early twentieth century. On the other hand, the new technology opened up fresh possibilities for artistic creation. At the same time, there were artists who were more interested in experimenting without using cameras, using the properties of photosensitive materials in combination with graphic and photographic elements, painting and all sorts of objects. During the interwar era, Laszlo-Moholy Nagy’s photograms appeared, as did Man Ray’s rayographs and rayograms, Christian Schad’s schadographs and Karol Hiller’s heliographic compositions. In terms of technology, these were not epoch-making discoveries but, in the sphere of art, they were important in that they incorporated photographic techniques into the arsenal of means for the creation of autonomous works. Typically, the artists chose not to describe their work by the name ‘photography’, reserving the use of that term for mechanically recorded images without an inherent creative element. In Paris, in 1937, Man Ray published a book entitled La photographie n’est pas l’art (Photography is Not Art) together with André Breton and, in 1973, he declared that:

An original is a creation
motivated by desire.
Any reproduction of an original
is motivated by necessity. (…)
To create is divine, to reproduce
is human.1

Paradoxically, though, it is not his paintings which are held in greater esteem nowadays, but his photography, and not only his raygrams, at that, but also the shots he took for fashion houses. Karol Hiller maintained much the same attitude; in an article published in 1934, he stated that, in painting on celluloid film with gouache tempera, using a range of liquids and preserving his activities on photographic paper, he was aiming not so much to replicate a phenomenon as to revolutionise matter, reconstruct the elements and vegetative forms, to create a galaxy.2

Sławomir Pawszak’s photograms, created almost a century on, fit genetically into the stream of experimentation using ‘drawing’, or to be precise, ‘painting with light’. They are undoubtedly most akin to Hiller’s heliographics, but in terms of concept rather than technique. In 1933, Hiller met a scientist, Ary Sternfeld, in Łódź. What brought them together was their profound interest in cosmic space. Stenfeld wrote a book on cosmonautics but, in Poland, his theories and calculations were deemed to be the fabrications of a mad scientist and he was unable to find a publisher. The work was eventually published in French as Initiation à la cosmonautique (Introduction to Cosmonautics) with a cover design by Hiller.

Pawszak uses a scanner and computer for his works, experimenting with form and technique. He creates images by applying transparent paints to the glass of the scanner, juxtaposing them with pictures of enlarged elements of objects, stencils. In form, the structure of the images that emerge is open and outwardly abstract and, in nature, it is fragmentary and syncretic. Affected by the light, the shapes of figures lose the solid mass of their materiality, their corporeality, becoming transparent and interpenetrating. Small islands sometimes appear, illuminated by flashes of light seemingly caused by explosions of cosmic energy. Realistic and fantastical elements coexist, creating images of an unknown universe.

Sensorily, our world relates to a specific size dimension. Although our sensory cognisance falls within a definite range of orders of magnitude, we are aware that what we see with the ‘naked eye’ is located somewhere between the atomic scale and cosmic structures. However, we have manufactured tools which enable us to study those invisible entities and expand our research in the direction of micro- and macroscale alike. They are closely linked to one another, because we do, after all, use the structure of the micro-world to explain phenomena occurring in the macro-world.

In his photograms, Pawszak creates a painterly vision of the macro-world by using enlarged images from the micro-world. To borrow the title of Christophe Galfard’s best-selling book, it is a kind of pictorial ‘universe in your hand’. As mentioned earlier, he uses a scanner and a computer. He seems to be seeking his own unique artistic techniques but, whether we call his new works photographs or photograms or something else again appears not to be of vital significance because, in this instance, we should probably agree with Man Ray, who wrote:

Of course, there will always be those who look only at technique, who ask ‘how’, while others of a more curious nature will ask ‘why’. Personally, I have always preferred inspiration to information.3

Lech Stangret

English translation by Caryl Swift

1 Man Ray, Originals Graphics Multiples in Man Ray: Opera grafica, Luciano Anselmino (ed.), (Turin: Luciano Anselmino, 1973), cited in Man Ray, Writings on Art, Jenny Mundy (ed.), Andrew Strauss and Edouard Sebline (consulting eds.), The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, 2015, p. 442

2 Karol Hiller, Heljografika, jako nowy rodzaj techniki graficznej, in “Forma”, No. 2, September 1934, p. 23.

3 Man Ray, Writings on Art, Jenny Mundy (ed.), Andrew Strauss and Edouard Sebline (consulting eds.), The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, 2015, p. 395

Laniakea

A conceptual spacecraft on a journey beyond the territory of art. A vision in three acts: a test of scale, invention and form.

First attempt. Door marked ENTRANCE. First drawing of lots. An old riddle from 1969, still unsolved (originally encrypted as a photogram):

What is it that changes into something else exactly when you learn of its existence?

In the first attempt we will explore the notion of a conceptual “supercluster.” This term does not allude to artistic traditions or favour any further, rugged paths for the development of art. Everything is, was and will be, simultaneously—escapism is condemned to failure. This attempt is tied to the mundane fantasy of meeting the entire crew of the spaceship (8,085,000 people, according to figures from the Universal Bank), which will never happen. Incidentally, we draw attention to the problem of the lack of cultural competencies in the entire galactic population. Some things never change, even when the sky has fallen on our heads.

The first superclusters began to form between 1966 and 1972. They were unstable, and just a few of them survived longer than two or three centuries. A supercluster is a mass bereft of specific characteristics enabling us to abstract it from the surroundings and distinguish it from other forms of organizing social life, political parties or intellectual agendas. A supercluster instinctively fills empty spaces in fault lines and disciplinary cavities, and also conducts heat well. It occasionally assumes human form. It has a weakness for anamorphosis. But it cannot abide mock-ups, models, any objects created to scale (and for the same reason does not use maps or globes, and abhors dolls). It shuns spiritual escapades but does not imitate reality. Superclusters arose as natural environments, mega-greenhouses for creating new, interspecies communications networks essential for administering newly colonized planets. A side effect of their emancipation is the renewal of deposits of rare-earth metals. And to think that the efficacy of art was ever doubted!

A supercluster would feel most at ease far from any large planets. But to function properly it requires the right infrastructure: visible and invisible architecture, a textual framework, legal regulations, units of measurement, certificates. It is hard to ignore the fact that picking out a supercluster in the sky requires specific cultural competencies, as well as training of the eye for which many lack the desire or the funds.

Beyond the door is a dark space where the light of a scanner pulses rhythmically. From the human perspective this sight may be compared to the glory of the aurora borealis.

Second attempt. Door marked EXIT. Second drawing of lots. An old riddle from 1969, still unsolved:

What is it that has no place on earth and whose boundaries are undefined?

The second attempt is entirely based on an anonymous letter to artists 7.0, who settled Earth after the planet was scrubbed clean of concretions of internet resources. The letter is riddled with anachronisms. The author suggests a new artistic agenda grounded on the experiences of the ancient avant-garde of the 20th century [sic]. He recommends an experiment with literature as a form of artistic expression, employing the theory of the “art of glue” and the metaphor of a snowball to stimulate the imagination.

S. is not yet aware of the new regulations and resolutions. He will learn about them in a few days, when the radioactive dust settles and a new world emerges from the ruins. It can’t be ruled out that art will have to be invented all over again. There are several possible scenarios for the future. We will use telepathy (as no self-respecting theoretician has doubted since the late 1960s). We will build a telecommunications network out of everyday items, but put more effort into interspecies exchange—it will be a glorious era of trans-species collectivism. We will levitate, learn to bend space and control time, create things by thought, correct deeds and erase failure. We will understand the problem with “always being.” We will reach the zero phase. Then the notice may be posted: “The planet will be closed during the exhibition.”

Third attempt (with the door open). Third drawing of lots. An old riddle from 1969, partially solved. And thus:

What is composed of many parts which can at the same time be parts of something entirely different?

Each attempt to leave the spaceship provides new and absurd information. Each new set of instructions takes the form of an oracle aimed at a select audience, fluent in the jargon of the prehistoric theory of conflict management and change management. In his vision, S. alludes (twistedly) to “painting with light.” But he does not pick up the thread of the autonomy of art, once again suggesting the “duplicity” of the Western Artistic Company which so proficiently succeeded in homogenizing art across the entire galaxy.

“To summarize: Our journey passes through seven phases, of object, space, time, imagination, infinity, until finally we enter the zero phase. We will no longer be capable of naming anything, so it will be harder for us to pursue art. Art will pursue us.”

“So let’s assume state organization,” I volunteer. “From the very gazing into the molecular haze we can choke on the vision of a new social order. I imagine fertile fields, trees sagging with fruit, herds of unicorns, lots of rhymes and low sounds, red and black flags, concrete, fish and tropical plants, ready access to psychoactive substances for recreational purposes, at least a hundred days of sunshine a year, hives and hotels for wild insects, the possibility of regenerating a small population of mammoths, transfer of thoughts beyond the communications networks of Homo sapiens….”

“Enough, enough!” S. interrupts. “I get the picture. I’ll paint it under hypnosis, in a fever. Let’s forget the laborious escape through the avant-gardes of the 20th century, no more sentimentality! We’ve already seen it all. If humanity had never discovered painting, sculpture and photography, it would do so now, experimenting in the kitchen with food, chains and aerosol, while at the same time engaging in big politics and travelling through time.”

S. lies on the floor and closes his eyes. He speaks slowly and eloquently of the need to settle the score with realism once and for all. He recites from memory passages from artistic manifestos from the past millennium, shares visions of the near future: neo-agonism, mutualism, tropical anamorphism, and so on. He mounts a tiny planetoid, ignites it like a firecracker, and with a boom they shoot off into the cosmos. From above he examines the trajectories of careers, the formal and intellectual ascents and declines of everyone certified as a visual artist over the past three decades. The door is ajar. The superclusters fall into battle array and head toward the museum. The traffic is two-way. The planets hum “The Internationale.”

Sebastian Cichocki

English translation by Christopher Smith

Cannabis, Whisky, Ananas

Michał Suchora: What is the meaning behind the title "Cannabis, Whisky, Ananas?"

Sławomir Pawszak: It's from the chorus of song by the (Polish hip-hop group) WWO. A classic hip-hop track. These are the symbolic attributes of the success of a fulfilled rapper, dreaming of the good life and of peace. He's aware there's a great deal of work ahead, but he also knows that he will have the opportunity to rest and gather the fruits of his labor. Cannabis, whisky, ananas (pineapple) are the rewards he has in store.

All the works in the show were made in 2013. I listened to American rap while painting most of them. It was a nice way to pass the time. I sort of painted to the rhythm of hip-hop music. Through the paintings I attempted to relay the vibrant dynamic and the ethereal ambiance of the music, and the good mood I was in. I thought about what I was doing as a sort of hip-hop freestyle. The hip-hop aesthetic fascinates me. It's about excess and high contrast, an impossible combination of ideas and symbols, and a baroque form. It's an interesting area to explore, a mix of the freshness and visual abundance of form with basic kitsch. Like the method adopted by rappers who find truth in describing their own personal experiences in their lyrics, I painted pictures about what's closest and most familiar to me, that is, about my own life, in which painting itself plays a major part.

– Did you graduate from the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts? Is that where you became a painter?

– No, the Academy gave me the opportunity to get to know people who, to paraphrase the title of one of Paweł Sysiak's performance, "believed in art with all their hearts". They were actively interested in contemporary art, we spoke about it all the time, we traveled around Europe to see exhibitions. I was more inspired by my acquaintance with people like Kasia Przezwańska, Tymek Borowski, Paweł Śliwiński, more so than by any professor's critique. As for painting, I'd started much earlier. When I was young, I would draw a lot and my parents signed me up for art classes at the Palace of Culture and Science. Later my enthusiasm waned, in the middle of elementary school. In high school I started again, girls from my classes would pose for me, it was very entertaining and I fondly remember those days. Then came the time to choose a subject at university. It was then that I realized that painting was something I was best at. My third year of studies was crucial. We were very critical of ourselves, we thought that nothing could be done for its own sake, that in art everything has to have a bigger, more elevated purpose. I realized that I was painting in the manner of Tuymans/Sasnal and there was nothing good to come of it. The problem with Sasnal was the fact that the subject of his paintings is what interests any young person with an interest in culture: contemporary history, social issues, politics, heroes of our times, the scope of the universe. At the time I believed that art has to refer to one of these issues. I understood, however, that there is no point in telling the same story and I decided to swerve in the other direction. I started by taking a closer look at the very process of my painting and I soon realized that I most liked my work when it had just begun, when it wasn't yet clear what was it was meant to depict. That's when I first dared to leave a painting incomplete, remaining "underpainted". I asked myself the simple question of why I would need to polish it if it already looked good as it was. Finishing a painting suddenly seemed like a useless convention. This is how I started painting sparing, minimalist compositions on a white background.

Do you still paint from photographs?

– Today my paintings are no longer minimalist, but they still come about based on photographs. It looks like this: I find unusual photographs on the Internet, strange, colorful, shocking, etc... When I collect a dozen or so, sometimes a few dozen, that I find revolve around a particular subject that interests me, I make a collage of sorts and then I paint it. I fuse it into a single composition. When working on some recent paintings, I mostly collected photos of rappers, their lovers, dancers, photos from their live concerts, music video stills, shots from their private lives, their jewelry, clothes, food... These are some colorful characters, figuratively and literally. The whole hip-hop scene is wild, there's a lot to work with.

– So does this mean your paintings are to some extent an illustration of something? Are the subjects of the photographs presented in a guise that is more or less deformed?

– It varies a great deal. Some things appear as a whole, others in parts. They overlap, vary in scale and perspective, they are blurred or stretched. Sometimes I'm painting one thing and start to see something else in it, such as chocolate, and I so I try to make the thing more like chocolate. So that it's something between what it actually is and chocolate. I know how strange this sounds.

– How exactly does the music you listen to affect you. Does a painting done to the rhythm of Azaelia Banks appear different to that of (Polish hip-hop artist) Sokoła?

– To some minor extent yes, music adds a rhythm to my work, even in how I move about the studio. It seems like nothing, but there is certainly something about it that remains within the work. When you stand before a big blank canvas, which is appealing in and of itself, it's hard to take that first step. You need a stimulus, one that will allow you to break up that harmonious composition. Music is just right for this. Sometimes I listen to classical music while I paint. Some time ago I constantly listened to Wagner's "Der Ring des Nibelungen". Wagner is spectacular, some would say, ostentatious. A bit like the Jay-Z of his time.

– Were you ever afraid that this sort of inspiration would be considered infantile or simplistic among art circles?

– I don't worry about that anymore. When I began to show my minimalist paintings a few years ago, they were met with a fair degree of interest. As they became more and more explosive, unpalatable, I knew that they didn't appeal to the tastes of certain people because they weren't prim and proper. If you're making abstract art in the 21st century you can be sure that what you listen to shouldn't impact your image. I know perfectly well that I can't make certain people like what I'm doing. Anyway, it depends which circles you're talking about, some time ago MSN (Museum of Contemporary Art) put on a great show of new artists and curators, titled "Nie ma sorry" (There's no sorry), which was a reference to the lyrics of (Polish hip-hop artist) Tede. They even invited him to perform, but he didn't get the idea and turned it down.

– When did you begin listening to hip-hop?

– Not too long ago, when I started University. Wait a second, I started University a while ago...

– But you identify with the culture? You go to concerts and so on?

– No, can you believe I've never been to a hip-hop concert? You know why? Because I'm afraid of clashing with the reality of it. I prefer to maintain my own romantic vision of this milieu than to attempt to verify it. There are a few extremely talented rappers. This is the voice of the streets, folk poets, and my affinity for them is an expression of my own "folk-mania". I'm interested in this sort of folk wisdom, but I'm not necessarily looking to find a place for myself within it.

– As part of your show at BWA Warszawa, you speak explicitly of your fascination with this subculture.

– I'm interested in subjects that (Polish) art doesn't discuss. I wanted to do a group show about hip-hop with artists who regularly listen to the genre and use it in their art in various ways, as a source of inspiration or a filter through which they see things. For me, the hip-hop concept of flow is important. It's a state in which you know exactly what you're doing, something like inspiration, but not as capricious. I think this state can be almost permanent. Flow is when you work with ease, freely, at one with yourself. When what you're doing comes naturally and instinctively, and it gives you pleasure. Of course, to do something instinctively doesn't mean to do it thoughtlessly. As I paint, the whole time I'm making an effort to control the image, to focus. I detest naïve art, scribbles, streams of consciousness, the expression of emotions through finger-painting.

– Do you sketch before painting?

– No, never. I used to, but I would burn myself out by the time I finished the sketch. In my case, the mechanical transfer of a sketch onto a canvas doesn't work, the energy is gone. I simply didn't want to paint the same thing twice. For me, the moment when I approach a blank canvas is numbing. This stark white rectangle is plainly beautiful and I'm always afraid to ruin it. The start of a painting is an act of destruction, I have to destroy something to create something. I have to make it through that critical moment, to begin arranging things that are meant to appear on the canvas, to begin creating some sort of order. It's very important not to let this moment fly by.

– When do you know for sure that a painting is finished?

– I just feel it, although recently I've had a problem with this. It so happens that I come back to a painting that I thought was finished and I start to tweak the details. Through such details you can go deeper and deeper into a painting.

– You mean you don't make a painting in one go?

– Nearly never. On the first day I create a so-called backbone. When I feel I have the painting under control, I can ease off, I no longer have to be so aggressive towards the canvas. The second, alternative option is for me to mess up the canvas and have to throw it out the next day. I find that paintings are not forgiving, I can't just blot out or cover up something that didn't work out.

– Do you have a formula to describe your style of painting? Not long ago you were associated with the group of artists "tired of reality", perhaps because you studied with Tymek Borowski and Paweł Śliwiński, whom you're still friends with.

– I never tired of reality. On the contrary. I'm completely at odds with the poetics of so-called magical realism. That's not my scene, even if I wanted to I wouldn't be capable of creating imaginary worlds, filling them with deformed figures, skeletons in top hats marching along. It would be deceitful, there was never a speck in me that longed for magic. It's another thing altogether to appreciate the paintings of Ziółkowski or Śliwiński, but what draws me to them is not quite their oneiric spirit, but rather the playfulness and nonchalance that spills over into impudence.

– If it isn't "tired of reality", then what is it? How can we describe you? Perhaps the strongest element of your new pictures calls attention to the idea of toying with something that is alarming aesthetically, mashing pop culture (hip hop) with the traditional motions of abstract art.

– I do indeed think that what I find most appealing about painting is taking an aesthetic risk. I consider what I do to be a pursuit of something new rather than a game with the old. I'm looking for a piece of available space for myself somewhere on the edge of abstraction and the intensity of hip-hop culture. I'm not interested in making references to the past, that is to say, of course tradition has its impact on what I do because it has to, but that's not the subject of my work. In making art the most important thing for me is the awareness that I'm doing something I enjoy and I'm not afraid of ridicule. When I paint, I feel a flow and I hope that flow comes through in my work.

Bigos*, Paintings, and Bicyclists

Let's see how it is:

Contemporary painters do not paint pictures; they use the medium of painting as a way to create contemporary art. These “paintings” they make are encrypted, ambiguous, and metaphorical messages. The artists dress them up in many erudite clues that suggest a second (third and fourth) layer of meaning.  The concerns of contemporary painting can be reduced to the question of “how can one make a unique and attractive object that looks as if it has something profound to say”.

Sławek moves in the opposite direction. Instead of constructing messages he makes THINGS. He paints; he simply creates objects. Thus, Sławek does something that is rare in today's formal, contemporary art scene: he does not deceive himself or his audience. What you see is what you get.

It is necessary to point out that Sławek's practice does not contain symbolic meaning (as probably every consummate art-geek would automatically assume so). Likewise, Sławek does not intend to show us something through the fact that he “just paints”. When one cooks bigos, it's not about the symbolic magnitude of the fact that one makes it. It's about cabbage and sausage.

Certainly, such naive honesty makes Sławek an easy target. He abandons the possibility of “enchanting” with his paintings, and defending them with artworldish discursive babble.

(By the way, if you are worried that you have gone halfway through reading a “text about Sławek”, and have not yet seen a Polish hip-hop verse, I assure you that there will be one, but not until the end.)

Sławek's practice is especially intriguing in the context of the inevitable coming era of “Normal Culture”. We live in fascinating times. Cultural changes accelerate at an exponential pace. The old hierarchies and cultural models were turned inside out and knotted into a big pretzel.     Currently, less and less people pay attention to the age-old pedestals that forced us to give special treatment to certain things (like art). Now, : flavorful bigos, a good painting, and a well-made bicycle can all exist on the same plane.

Excuse my intellectual vulgarity, but I can't help myself. Would you ride a shitty bike if its designer convinced you that it was deep, unique and consistently well-thought out? I can bet that you wouldn't. This same rule is starting to take effect in the arts. You, standing in front of a Sławek Pawszak painting, I would like say (quoting Sokół):Welcome to reality.

Tymek Borowski

* A traditional Polish stew made of cabbage and sausage.

Persistence

„This is not an abstraction”. The phrase Sławomir Pawszak has chosen as a title of his presentation obviously relates back to its famous predecessor – Rene Magritte’s “Ceci n’est pas un pipe” – the title he had given one of his notorious works. And in that case, indeed , it was not a pipe. It was an oil- on-canvass representation of it. In case of Pawszak’s works, things get a bit perverse: what we have before our eyes when looking at any of the artist’s works, as a matter of fact, looks abstract enough to be called abstractionist art in most other cases, - these, however, are not to be taken at face value: their appearance may deceive, as although they look abstract, in fact, they are not. For one, the artist himself made it known on several occasions that he paints from photographs and bears in mind very specific portions of reality while working. We have to take his words bona fide as the motives in Pawszak’s paintings defy recognition: identification of any of them with a real thing – a pipe for that matter, or anything else – is impossible. And still, that apart, there is too much realness in them, that they just cannot be called abstract. The painterly surface of canvass, the very substance of paint, its depths of texture – almost relief-like, the traces the paint leaves when flowing down, blotches and planes, the chromatic interrelations, composition of elements within the formal framework : this is not abstract art – oh no. It is reality. Painterly one. Pawszak is trying to restore to us viewers the primary experience of the art of painting, so that when looking at a painting, we would actually be seeing it instead of trying to keep pace with endless forking references that so often lead us astray, further and further away from the work we stand face to face with.

Many times before and for many painters have formal quests ended up against a wall at the end of an alley which had eventually proven blind and were finding themselves in a situation when painting is no more. Pawszak, however, seems to be travelling that same road, only in a reverse direction. He is one painter who starts with a wall close behind his back, as the nature of the formula he chooses to employ is in its extremity – it is a small step from where he starts from to the point of ultimate non-painting. His starting point is next to nothingness: a tiny fragment on a vast emptiness of a canvass. It is as if starting anew with the art of painting: just when we were about to call it a day and proclaim ourselves the ones who have lived to see all results of every thinkable decision a painter can possibly make, a man steps forth and dares take the first step into the great unknown, as if nothing has ever happened or existed and makes each simple gesture, each stroke of brush regain its primordial importance. The plane of canvass, which seemed all but undiscovered, turns out to be a terra incognita still demanding its testimony in a painterly cartography.

Stach Szablowski

Forty degrees in shade

It has been only a year since Sławek Pawszak drew attention to his talent presenting his painter’s diploma at the Center for Contemporary Art Zamek Ujazdowski in Warsaw. The concept of large-scale white canvasses with tiny bits of reality painted on them has grown out of Edmund Husserl’s "Phenomenology". It was an attempt to look at the reality in a way, which the artist himself described as “careless tourist’s”. Pawszak unambiguously positioned himself in relation to the art of painting; he was disinterested in narration from day one. What intrigues him most are the properties of the painterly medium as such – beginning from the substance of paint, via the specificity of the very act of painting and all the way to the ambiguous situation of the art of painting of today; on the one hand treated and acting as a fetish, on the other, stigmatized as the obsolete area of contemporary art world.

The „Forty degrees in shade” exhibition collects paintings and objects created in the last three months. In the drying room on the 8th floor of the block of flats where Pawszak lives, layers upon layers of his painterly activity amassed, traces of paint and oil, blotches, traces left by wiping of brushes, unfinished canvasses, some cut to pieces standing against the walls. Pawszak takes an intimate look at those remnants and paints their portrait. The art of painting thus becomes utterly narcissistic and self-devouring activity. Self-sufficient and therefore devoid of any outward pretence.

Agnieszka Czarnecka