Painting in motion

  Three years ago, one of Piotr Mlodozeniec`s exhibitions was titled "Moving Paintings". It was a classic presentation of all the genres that this versatile artist was involved in: painting, poster art, graphic art and computer animation. From the very beginning, he pursues the thread of painting which indirectly allows unique creation within other fields. His painting is in permanent motion - development, that we can observe at his subsequent exhibitions.
   Piotr has been educated at the studio of Henryk Tomaszewski. Thus, the artistic language dominated by the strong sign and a well-aimed methaphor have remained a powerful aspect of his creative work till today. Neverthless, his expressive, instantly recognized style has originated from his personal experiencing of archaic art, as well as from primitive and modern art of the turn of this century, for which the two above were crucial in the process of shaping its self-identity. Not only did the artist create posters, but he also made graphics and holiday postcards. Back in the eighties they used to be "our true" commentary on the reality that was falsified in many ways.
   To Piotr, painting is an area of spontaneous creativity, which - contrary to his graphics - does not require a huge number of succeeding close-up drawings. It is a kind of a journal that the artist enters without a preconceived plan. Despite that, the rigours that were imposed on him while working on graphics and posters, are still present in his art. They might not be recognized at first sight, but they exist as mastered skills that he abandons in order to fully express his subconsciousness, to pour onto the canvas the personal meanings so deep, they had to be encoded deeply. A painting comes into being by means of a dynamic dialogue between the forms, the colour that fills out its surface and the artist who has taken up the work having charged the batteries but without a project-idea that is to take the form of artistic meat. Oftentimes, such pattern does not allow finishing a painting.
   His painting is free of the struggle shared by the disciples of painting studios. It is free of the whole weight ot tradition and thematic adequacy. The tradition, according to which a painter has to face the whole entangled spiritual reality while relating to the form in innovatory way.
   Through his contact with art at home, his artistic fascinations and education he has received from the master of sign, Piotr Mlodozeniec - whose art was originally graphic - started to insist on distinct, synthetic picturing and a "the less the better" rule. There were two technological factors in connection with that rule which have largely contributed to the creration of his own style and the forms that can be seen in his works. They included making of author`s silk-screen printing and drawing by means of Kid Pix - a simple computer program.
   The posters manufactured in that way were quickly carried into effect. Printed on wrapping paper, they accompanied most of the exhibitions of so-called "new wild" in mid eighties. Virtually, they were indispensable trademark sign of the most important artistic events in Warsaw of those years.
   The motifs and the formal solutions that were found in that type of works have also influenced painting. As in the case of the schematic figure of a little man - resembling the ones seen on informational icons - that started to became an active subject of the events narrated in the paintings. Symbolic congestions and concretions of narrated stories precisely supplemented the qualities of the world as experienced by the artist. Emotions had their own colours. The world was was presented in a flat, symultaneous projection. The artist has frequently made use of dynamic, diagonal space. The titles were saying: "A Fellow", "Rygu, Rygu" ("Puke, Puke"), "Malibu".
   His last pictures are composed of blotches of clear colour, leaving no place for history nor for any remnants of space.Sometimes, like in the past, there appears a strong symbolic, and yet dubious motif ("The Left Hand"). Most often, however, the motifs and the figures are coded like in a perceptivity test. At the same time, the abstract dynamics of the blotches and of faces or letters that we can recognize, send a clear message ("Okay"). This is an art of verbs and it isnít static. It has to be put in order by a spectator and that way it emits a thought about the dynamic nature of the reality and interhuman relations. Several paintings depict in an effortless manner the experience of working with a small video camera. Such as the adventures it has taken part in, the situations that have involved the cameraman. At the same time, those unexpected arrangements emerge before us as caught by camera lens ("Autocamera",íAutocamera II").
   The carelessness of the form, the roughness and the overall lack of elegance do not make our perception of his works easy. Constructed in accordance with the rules that were - among others - introduced by the modern painting of the turn of the last century, the paintings of Piotr Mlodozeniec have not surrended to the superficial discipline and aesthetisation.
   His paintigns move us on many levels - through the initial bombardment and through the dialogue of forms that balance one another. Using highly contrasted means, they unfold the hidden face of reality together with the weak and strong interactions that occur within it.
   Neverthless, there is a kind of works which - despite their spontaneity - have been based on a precisely designed pattern. They are the paintings, the dominating structure of which is composed of the prints of the sewage hatches that are manufactured in New York, though some of them also come from the streets of Japan. It is a unique combination of painting and his favourite technics of graphic art. It is the alchemy between the matrix and the print that appears to be the same while in fact, it never really makes an ideal copy. It is printing that hasn`t come from a studio. It is made in the street, in motion - it`s when the artist paints a sewage hatch and then prints the pattern on canvas. It later becomes the centre of the painting, where our attention is directed to its circular, mandala-like form. It strikes us as an entrance to the underground world of the present times. The world which has been deprived of old meanings, but perhaps not quite completly.
   The first pictures to utilize the motif of print were made in the beginning of the ninieties in Konstancin. There, any fragment of bars, fence or covernig of a gas well could be transfered onto canvas. To make them, the artist used serigraphic prints of the photographs of old villas together with the prints of the objects found at the places. That created tension and built a symbolic union between them. Likewise, a newspaper or a TV picture could also be transfered in the same way. They were selected for their overall qualities and they made a statement about a special moment in history - both the world`s history and the personal history of his own. Sometimes, though, it meant showing two girls running along the beach, Mathias Rust or the deceased Reverend Jerzy Popieluszko. The transfering process together with subsequent simplifications had an impact on their graphic clarity that required few artistic endeavours and some strong emphasis in order for the work to be expressive.
   Filled with visual extremism, many pictures of Piotr Mlodozeniec reflect the present times, the living history and the history of his own. It is composed of events that express an individual human reaction to the world and to those who take the most important challenges upon themselves. That personalistic aspect is what distinguishes the works of Piotr Mlodozeniec. The works that do not claim the right to make big generalizations, while deliberately focusing on a perhaps accidential event or person. They strike us important metaphors thanks to their formal qualities and the intensity of emotion.

Krzysztof Zwirblis
translation Dorota Liliental
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