I used to cut out those reproductions from every issue of the “Przekrój” magazine.
From the new ones having read them through first, of course, but once my aunt
gave me a pile of old copies and that was real fun. I used to stick them into an ordinary
blue notebook with not much ado, un-chronologically, medieval stuff next to Gauguin
or Otto Dix . I’d cut them out unevenly – always had a problem with that – applied too
little or too much glue, making either dog-ears or causing the pages to stick together.
The whole was un-pretty, reproductions too green at most times, for although the mag’s
editors strove for quality, they never actually got it.
Kandinsky, Tanguy, Tchórzewski, Gorky, Miró were almost certainly there, because
back then, without having seen the originals I still could smell the scent and feel the
texture and curves of old stretchers, or so it seemed that I felt and knew them, for they
were unfathomable, inexplicable, indescribable. I always saw them with this green-toochre
slant. Much later, when I got to see the originals, I was not sure if I didn’t like the
images stored in my memory better, different from the real things as they were.
The painting of Sławek Pawszak is non-representational, although much like the imperfect
illustrations from my old notebook, it stems from reality. My first encounter with
his paintings instantly evoked the memories of those reproductions and brought back
the feeling of a mediated physical contact with a painting (the feeling, which drew its
strength from the fact that there were not many representations around at that time).
Pawszak blows up micro-worlds he finds; a small splash of paint, a trace easily missed
out if not looked at from up-close, an un-wiped leftover of an event. Out, come the
worlds of colliding or adjacent forms, photographical images of a small fragment of a
working table painterly finished and “beautified”. The author, however, does not pretend
to be creating from nothingness, because he remains aware at all times of the history
of painting and quotes it consciously, although indirectly. Non-existent “landscapes”,
“still natures” of invented forms are painted with all the skill and knowledge. Physically
pleasurable in contact, his paintings may, however, also disrupt the seeming certainty
of their neutrality as well, posing the everlasting question of relation to the history of
the medium, its possibilities and technical properties. There appears also the tempting
possibility of purely phenomenological view, which they seem to offer.
„Words debase all”, says Konrad, the hero of Thomas Bernhard’s „Lime Works”. The
author choosing this statement for the title of his exhibition uses it, perhaps, to express
his conviction that images are better vehicles for non-verbal senses and emotions.
Leaving the original context aside, I understand it as a recourse to intuition in art, an
intuition that is conscious of the medium, obviously. Pawszak gives his viewers full
freedom of reading his paintings, which have nevertheless been painted in full responsibility
towards the Art of Painting - the mythical (if not mythologized) world of Painters.
The initial capitals are here as respectful as they are warmly ironic. Hinting in his title
that words may be imperfect, he does not rule them out entirely. The quotation he uses
warns, not bans.
Seeing those paintings reproduced on the screen for the first time immediately evoked
fragrances of that old notebook – mixture of the scent of glue, wet paper with a pinch
of metallic flavor of scissors and something else not easily defined immaterial element
stored in the un-real museum of memory. Simultaneously, I scoured my memory in
near-painful effort to recall where exactly I have seen those forms for the first time.
I mean images, not Words.
Wojciech Kozłowski
director of BWA Zielona Gora, Poland
Sławomir Pawszak, Untitled, 2011, oil on canvas, 180 x 130 cm
