Truth works within the urban space. He creates installations in places that he picks intuitively.

First the idea for the work appears, then later comes the desire to implement and see it in reality. The physical space in which it appears is essential. The work without the place cannot exist. You can’t just simply cut it away and present it on a different background; it sinks deep into the city like a parasite.

In 2008 the artist conducted a series of interventions in a park in Wroclaw, the city in which he was born. A black footbridge connects the shores of a trench filled with water. It’s probably impossible to cross it, as it has a large rectangular hole in it. Actually, it looks a lot like a door. You might think that someone would want to use it to go over the ditch and take advantage of what they had found. However, the form is too perfect to appear as a random item. The artist created this work exactly in the place where he played as a child. He remembered this only after completing the intervention, and of how he used to fool around by walking over the frozen water until the ice cracked. The work had become an autobiographical childhood memory, similar to the second object he placed at one of the stately houses that are near the same park. The artist remembers that those houses always seemed mysterious and inaccessible to him. Years later he returned to that area to create a form resembling a basement entrance. It’s perfectly made, without unnecessary details. These black objects in a Wroclaw park may serve as an exemplification of an artistic act. They are finely crafted structures, illegally abandoned in a public space, whose design looks to be of the highest quality. Simplified forms, regardless of their scale, are foreign, abstract bodies which will always resemble something and are reminders of many things; yet manage to not actually be any them.

The beginning of Krystian’s work took place in Wroclaw where his first objects were made from materials found in the refuse dumps of advertising companies. They were small, the artist could carry them under his arm, and unnoticed, he could leave them at almost any place he wanted- gardens by the high viaducts, chimneys, factories, tenement houses and apartment buildings. He chose both public and almost never attended places. All of Truth’s projects, regardless of their scale, are mindful in their geometric construction and modernistic design. In contrast to the urban mess, they are a small attempt to introduce an ideal form. They can act like a memory of a lost, destroyed urban design. Similarly like all utopian visions, their output state is rapidly destroyed as they submit to the rhythm of the city. The initial ideal form loses its shape; it grays, falls apart, becomes covered in snow, tumbles off the wall, crashes and disappears. The traces of that change is demonstrated with photographic documentation (by Edyta Jezierska), which the artist incorporates into the creative process.

The “Fungus” project brought the artist popularity and visibility. He treats this project as a kind of tag, street logo, and urban signature. “Fungus” is comprised of duplicated forms, with which Truth annexes to urban architecture. “Fungus” defines a parasite that originates from the place of where it appears, and if it finds favorable conditions it can spread. The reproductions do not differ from its original. This is the type of work which arises without any effort, like a signature. Only the number of used elements change, but the concept remains the same, like a person’s handwriting. “Fungus” was well accepted; passers-by liked them, as well as critics and curators. They were all thirsty for good projects, which there was a lack of on the Polish streets. Simple forms that can be made irrespectively of the modern art institution’s budget, could not fail to enjoy success. At this time, when the artist could successfully reproduce his urban mushrooms, and begin falling into the trap of a devised form, new works appeared which significantly expanded his field of interests; becoming a strong and uncompromising step.

In 2008, for the project Among the Islands in Wroclaw, Truth prepared an installation that referred to his earlier works, although for the first time it was of monumental proportions. Over a moat in the city he scattered huge white beams of styrofoam, like matches poured out of a box. The intervention strikes with gusto. The interest in a larger space may be noticed as he’s experimenting in an area that until now had been closed off. He also starts to work with much greater freedom and totality of a concept. This type of project is completely unfamiliar in the history of Polish art and separates itself from the actions of other young Polish artists. However, it does evoke classic land artists such as Robert Smithson, Christo or Denis Oppenheim. Despite the large scale of the project, the constant willingness to put unusual forms into a specific space and using elements that we all know very well still remains. White beams over the surface of water covered with thick, green duckweed is a phenomenon so evocative that it’s hard to pass by it with indifference. The free structure draws attention to its accidental nature and ephemerality. This installation existed for only several hours, during which the artist observed the location and listened to the comments of random onlookers. He mentions that the point of this work was to create an impossible situation to see in a city, although highly probable. Eating hot waffles with whipped cream is a typical urban ritual. You can see the whipped white cream on the gray pavement, when the white and soft falls on the hard and rugged concrete. The artist imagined a similar scene in the countryside: whipped cream falling on the lush, dense grass. He explains that every time, he’s intent on creating aesthetic experiences which are difficult to describe and name clearly. Their uncommonness attracts attention and disables automatic thinking, making it so that we feel a well known place in a new, different way. The white beams were surprising in their scale but still fit in with Krystian Czaplicki’s previous actions. It was his work in Brno that was disconcerting. Invited for the festival Brno Art Open ’09, he prepared a project made out of concrete and granite. The wooded hills where the Szpilberk castle stands is mostly regulated, only a small part of it still remains naturally wild. Exactly there on the steep and narrow path, stands the fleshy, concrete form. This is the first time Truth has worked with such a durable material. The form was created from a hole dug in the ground which was later flooded with concrete. During the drying process it merged with the deeply embedded roots and stones, giving a very random and organic shape in the brown color of the local soil. From the concrete roots sprouts out a black square - a perfectly polished granite plate, which being set at an angle creates a mirrored surface. Going down the path, we see the black square and passing it, we look back to see what is written on it: but we don’t see any inscriptions, only the boughs of trees reflected off the granite. In 1915, Kazimir Malevich painted a black square on a white background, the most famous image of the twentieth century, and an iconic image, constantly quoted by the next generations of artists. The black square is the essence of abstraction, an infinite depth of imagination; it’s the negation of all organic forms. The square as a mathematical construct does not exist in nature. Truth, working in Brno has for the first time created a fleshy and organic form. Combined with the black square, it operates on the principle of the absolute opposite of what's shapeless with that which has been polished and sealed in a clearly defined framework. Granite slabs, common in cemeteries, with their permanent form work to ensure the memory of people and events. In Truth’s work, the tombstone in the form of a black square reflects the branches of trees. The constructivist pedigree in his earlier work was often analyzed. Curators and art critics often mentioned Malevich, Tatlin, El Lissitzky, Mondrian, minimalism of Donald Judd, Carl Andre, and inspiration from modern architecture. It is difficult not to make those comparisons when analyzing such consistent, geometric structures. However, the problem is that the artist uses them without their historical burden. He does not take on the utopian struggle or the promotion of a single, right form thereby creating an antidote for an entire neighborhood of disorder and mediocrity. He simply joins structures together like Lego blocks, and for him it’s as natural as breathing.

What astonishes me every time in Truth’s art is similar to the effect of a clamping circuit. All of his works appear like foreign bodies. Their precise forms suck into the pulsating structure of the city, whose purity and constancy can be put into the pages of a fairy tale. Despite their abstractness, in a strange way they become intrinsic to the feeling of the chosen place and fit perfectly into the whole.
When choosing the color for a work installed in 2007 in Pulawy on the premises of an inactive Gelatin Factory, the artist had mixed the colors of the elevation, the sky, the greenery and all other visible elements - the sum of which was a muted blue, nearly gray. Looking at the factory image this color exactly defines that space. A similar feeling applies to his other works, which appear in places where it seems that they always should have been a part of. It’s not only a matter of color but also of their shape and precisely chosen location. If the artist works in cities that he knows well, like his hometown Wroclaw or Pulawy, were he created a series of projects, it seems natural, but if he comes to a completely foreign place like Brno in Czech Republic, Bergen in Norway or Tarnow, he spends only a couple of hours or days and finds an ideal locale for his sculptural intervention, which fits like a glove, in that it possesses a certain uniqueness.

Inviting Krystian to Tarnow I was full of admiration for his earlier works, starting in 2005 with his small interventions in allotment gardens in Wroclaw and ending with his grand work with the white beams. Upon proposing to him that he create a realization of his work in Tarnow, I was hoping for a small intervention, a little illegally installed trinket, so that I could becoming excited about the whole project and the prospect of good art taking to the streets. The new project introduced by Krystian was unlike anything done previously, but perhaps alluded to his work in Brno. It was a combination of concrete forms with a steel beam, a total length of six and a half meters long, weighing three tons. I could not refuse this challenge, because so far every one of his works has been excellent. For the first time I saw with what ease Truth manipulates the materials, how the raw steel beam loses its weight with only a minimal change of color, of how the whole massive form overwhelming at the construction site, when set in a park under a tree turns into a toy, a precise model of a concrete structure resembling the bark of a tree. What for me was a great surprise, for Krystian it was the final realization of a precise vision. The most important moment for him still remains that point of materialization- when the project becomes a reality, and he admits that despite having done many productions, he continues to feel the same rush of anxiety and adrenaline each time.

* the title refers to a poem of Frank O'Hara : Having a Coke With You

translated by Anna Mazur