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| Grzegorz Pleszynski / Artur Maćkowiak |
performance25.11.2009 wednesday, 23:00, Mózg
Grzegorz PleszynskiBorn in 1955 in Olsztyn, studied at the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Mikołaj Kopernik University in Toruń. He is a painter, drawing artist, graphic artist, cover and poster designer, photographer, he does video-art, performance and happening. He works with prisoners (for his 10 years of work he was awarded a silver medal by the Minister of Internal Affairs), creates with handicapped and disabled people, teaches children and young people (an award from the Minister of National Education and an award from the School Superintendent. Since 1999, he has been the head of the Bydgoszcz branch of International Artists' Museum He was a co-organiser of the "Construction in Process 2000 - This Earth is a Flower". Many journeys and artistic contact significantly influence his ways of thinking. He talks about art and the world with artists from Africa, with Native Americans, Aborigines in the Australian bush, as well as painters from Singapore, New York, Berlin and Warsaw. It confirms him in his belief in important mission of art in the modern world, dominated by rational thinking. Art, coming from magic, has a power that is able to oppose the deviations and degenerations of technical civilisation, and to restore the sense of harmony with nature, universe and another human being. He is the author of an educational-artistic project "Antydepresyjna Szkoła" (Antidepressant School). For almost 20 years, Pleszyński has been active in the Bydgoszcz's Investigative Custody and other penitentiary institutions. "Harmonia Sztuki ? Harmonia Świata" (Harmony of Art ? Harmony of World) is an action that aims to search for one's own identity through art, and to restore to people the sense of belonging to a society. Important recent presentations: 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2007 Each mark is a separate entity, a different story. A recording of visual abundance of the world. I paint stories I saw on the TV, read in the papers, heard from other people, watched during a journey or remembered in a moment of delight. All of them are important when they become. In small paintings-marks I put events and emotionsI fish them out for a moment from the mass of the world that is happening, to close them in a tiny drop - a painting. Then they are watched in haste, at one glance, as a whole, fleetingly, like a reality of the day. They create a structure using the power of perpendiculars and levels dividing the plane. They remind rain drops on the surface of a lake. Only some of them draw attention, to disperse in a moment in the enormous mass of water. Their scale requires to stop and concentrate for a moment, to slow down the usually quick inspection of reality. Focusing on any of it expands one's experience. The general cacovisual noise blends into the background, and a whispered story of a single painting can be heard, telling of tortures in Tibet, of war in Iraq, of beauty of a sleeping cat, of sex, of freedom. Like a possessed collector, I put them with reverence next to each other, as if this could prevent their inevitable decayThis way, I create collections: of the important and the unimportant; of the beautiful and the ugly, of those which I liked for a moment and those which I appreciate as universal values. Together, they create an image of the world. Untrue, because it is static and already non-existent. But, paradoxically, the reasons for the paintings' existence frozen within them, create the dynamics of the whole structure, becoming less and less readable, at the same timeThey are like ripples ? disappearing, they make place for others. They pervade and overlap. Each of the paintings has a file in my mind, which contains the answers to the questions: e.g. why some of them came into existence, or, which of these should be important and which should not, or, which of these should be strong and which not? But, as time passes, I tend to forget about the fileThose which were important in the moment of creation, become unimportant, while these less important turn into extremely essential, due to the role they play in the composition as a whole; for example, by their understatements they intrigue and become more important than those supposed to be strong, powerful. Their initial roles and meanings are completely changed within the "social context of marks", that is in relation to other paintings. It happens passively, without my conscious participation. With each viewer, there is a peculiar game going on. Always, something else becomes important. Often, differently from what I intended and unlike Caravaggio's or Rembrandt's paintings, where the artist is showing the viewers their way through the painting, here the viewers decide for themselves: what they want to see, in what order, which elements are important for them, which are beautiful, which are funny or meaningless. They impose their emotions and sensations on the presented system of paintings in different ways. Playing different roles in private, social, family life, each of them is different and weaves their different experiences and feelings freely into the stories, creating own hierarchies and structures of small paintings. Each of them has also a different role to play, assigned by the great collector, who, in turn, uses them to make his own little paintings for billions of years. Grzegorz Pleszyński Artur MackowiakArtur Mackowiak - born in 1976- a musician and off culture animator, He has been active at the Polish music scene for over ten years. 1997-2003 he was a part of the band ?Something Like Elvis?, which was then one of the most significant alternative groups known outside Poland. Currently he performs with ?Potty Umbrella?, a band that has recorded two albums so far and that plays all around Europe. Since 1996, together with Grzegorz Pleszyński, Maćkowiak has been undertaking performance acts and creating visual art. They are mostly active in Bydgoszcz, as well as in Warsaw and Łódź. |
