"Mapping the Aftermath: Wlodzimierz Ksiazek's Embodied Cartography"
by David Pagel
Wlodzimierz Ksiazek makes paintings that are at war with themselves.
Take, for example, two modestly scaled oils on canvas from 2002.
Each measures 30-by-32 inches. Each consists of nothing but what
it was made of - pigment and medium and traces of the tools the
artist used to apply these age-old materials to a flat surface.
Like all of the insistently physical abstractions he has crafted
since 1990, these remain nameless. Ksiazek doesn't even bother with
the honorific "untitled," preferring, instead, to strip
his gritty panels to the naked essentials, Like prisoners of war
who invoke the Geneva Convention and only state their name, rank,
and serial number, his rigorously disciplined constructions are
accompanied by wall-labels or catalog captions that include only
three pieces of information: dimensions, media, and date, Most important,
each of Ksiazek's taciturn works has the presence of a three-dimensional
palimpsest, a complex object that is neither a proper low-relief
sculpture (because its components don't settle into a unified form);
nor a traditional abstract painting (because these same components
refuse to inhabit the single picture-plane of a coherent image or
the shallow pictorial space of a resolved composition).
The first is distinguished by a pair of dramatic blood-red splotches
Ksiazek has loosely brushed and dripped across two raised sections.
In the past, commentators have evoked blood-splattered walls to
account for similar passages. But if blood serves a metaphorical
purpose in this painting, it does so by suggesting that it emerges
from the fleshy layers of congealed pigment beneath it. Although
bright red visually leaps to the foreground, Ksiazek has integrated
this color into the rest of the work's tortured surface so that
it doesn't appear to have been splattered on, after the fact, as
some sort of theatrical gambit. Except for a half-dozen vertical
accumulations of snowy white, the rest of the panel's incised swathes
of paint range from warm tans to rich yellows and rosy pinks - the
tones of healthy skin and living flesh. Rather than standing in
as a surrogate record of something that happened in its proximity
Ksiazek's painting gives physical form to a current wound. Not merely
bloody, it appears to be bleeding. If poetic metaphors are in order,
it doesn't take great leap of the imagination to recall historic
narratives filled with heart-felt test; monies of mythical figures
whose stigmata signaled a powerful confluence of Christianity and
mysticism. In any case, the blood-red slabs in Ksiazek's painting
are shadowed by two larger and thicker sections of pristine white
pigment. Resembling bandages that have been lifted to reveal the
injuries beneath them, they intensify the visual force of his panel,
whose impact can be can be felt both in the solar plexus and in
the mind's eye, where it continues to reverberate long after you
turn away.
In terms of structure, the second work is similar: raised areas
of slathered-on paint are divided by an angular maze of trench-like
depressions. The most saturated colors and extreme contrasts in
tint occupy these high grounds, as do the most freely applied drips.
However, the emotional tenor of this painting is nothing like that
of the first one. Its palette of mossy olive greens, earthy beiges,
misty grays, hazy whites, and sky-blue high lights (accentuated
by a few fiery flicks of red-orange) firmly roots it in the realm
of nature, where the ongoing processes of growth and decay continue,
despite human intervention. Although Ksiazek's canvas evokes a natural
atmosphere and embodies the vast expanses of time that unfold there,
it shares very little with traditional landscape paintings. With
no horizon-Iine to suggest spatial recession, its format is that
of an aerial photograph of a territory flown owe r by a plane or
satellite. Because such technologies were developed for military
pun poses and are currently used for state surveillance, this painting
has the presence of information arrived at surreptitiously, if not
furtively At the same time, it recalls the work of archaeologists,
who use similar devices to make preliminary surveys of sites where
ancient ruins are partially buried beneath layers of soil, which
are themselves overgrown with foliage. The scale of Ksiazek's abstract
image suggests that its incident-rich surface measures off meters,
not centimeters, like its identically sized partner. Seen together,
the two paintings have the presence of a close-up of a body's wounded
flesh and a far-away view of an expansive Landscape. In both, the
painter treats their surfaces as living membranes, vital territories
vulnerable to destruction yet endowed with the power to survive
- and, perhaps, to flourish in the future.
Similarly scarred surfaces pile up to form the complex cartography
of Ksiazek's art. His body of work is littered with the residue
of in numerable clashes between thrusting wedges of color and the
myriad remnants of collisions among weather-beaten planes of variously
mottled textures, many of which buckle or crumble under the pressure
to which he subjects them. Interspersed among the gouges, cuts,
and other evidence of decisive, often violent actions are emphatic
splatters of paint, whose viscosity is more like tears, sweat -
or blood than cement. Ksiazek is a painter whose oeuvre addresses
one of the great themes of modern life: the tragic aftermath of
events in which things have spiraled out of control, leaving, in
their wake, smoldering ruins and broken dreams. The ancient Creeks
referred to such earth-shattering occurrences as instances of blind
fate: moments when the tide of history turned against one's will
because of the fickle desires of some all-too-human god. We moderns
are not so poetic. We attribute such inconceivable unpredictable
events to human willfulness, which we then say is beyond our comprehension.
This sort of convenient humility absolves us of responsibility at
the same time that it robs us of our capacity to have much impact
on our surroundings.
Ksiazek's defiantly incomplete works begin well after such damage
is done. Based in the knowledge that it is irreparable, they pose
the question: How can individuals, communities, and civilizations
possibly go on? As the twentieth century gives way to the twenty-first
and the unfathomable suffering that humanity continues to visit
upon itself shows no signs of abating, these quietly eloquent paintings
respond: How could we not?
Neither utopian nor romantic, Ksiazek's ruthlessly unsentimental
abstractions are so without fostering the illusion of a tabula rosa
or falling back on the fiction of absolute, Edenic innocence. Instead,
they accept the burden of history and the moral responsibilities
of any human endeavor that aspires to provide more than a moment
of respite from the cruelty, injustice and horror that forms the
dark side of civilization. Shot-through with the after-effects of
trauma, his stubborn acts of painterly defiance do not succumb to
them. Nor are they paralyzed by the evidence of destruction that
echoes across their fragmented fields of impure colors and congealed
lumps of inchoate materiality. Out of the deep melancholy that is
embodied in the battered and ravaged surfaces of Ksiazek's laboriously
worked paintings emerges the glimmer of hope - the barely perceptible
whisper that, despite the ever-accumulating devastation, all is
not lost. Rather than presenting viewers with clear-cut facts of
specific historical events, his intractable canvases lay the foundation
upon which a more general type of wisdom might be built - that of
living in the moment without forgetting what came before it.
By making works that are at war with themselves, Ksiazek subsumes
modernist self-referentiality into a wide range of emotionally charged
dramas that draw viewers into the picture, one-at-a-time, and over
and over again. Not so long ago, formally rigorous abstractions
like Ksiazek's were talked about in terms of autonomy. The question
was whether or not they asserted themselves with enough force to
stand on their own in a world generally hostile to the civilized
refinements and cultivated sensibilities that the visual arts have
come to represent since their humble beginnings on the walls of
caves in Africa and Europe. Although this line of inquiry invited
interested parties to argue about such painterly issues as surface,
texture, edge, color, structure, and scale as if they were matters
of life and death (which, in a way, they were), it too emphatically
turned its back on social reality, severing the complicated connections
that link pictorial space to the flesh-and-blood world in which
people live.
As an antidote, various forms of post-modern thought replaced the
wholeness, integrity, and immanence that high modernism prioritized
with their own celebration of the fragment. Broken contingent bits
and pieces picked up from the scrap heap of history became the basis
of works of art whose goal was not to stand apart from the tumult
and chaos of everyday life but to dive into it more deeply, giving
form to its complexity by articulating its contradictory meanings
and messages. Unfortunately, too many of these brave new works too
eagerly embraced the tactics and underpinnings of the mass media.
Their well-intentioned assault on the false integrity the picture-plane
eroded the very idea of integrity. Authenticity fell by the wayside
as most ended up either providing pleasant if fleeting diversions
from seriousness or, worse, perpetuating the problems they initially
sought to redress.
Ksiazek's paintings follow in the aftermath of both modernism and
post-modernism, His highly individualistic works preserve the ambitions
of the former, while dispensing with its all-or-nothing certitude,
They also build on the down-to-earth provisionality of the latter,
while eliminating its glib cynicism. Difficult, stubborn, and slow,
Ksiazek's art is simultaneously accessible, generous, and long lasting.
Not one of his paintings conveys a clear message that can be translated
into words, easily summed-up, and assessed for its accuracy, verisimilitude,
or truthfulness, Yet each opens onto multi-layered narratives that
branch out to include a potentially endless range of experiences,
memories, and aspirations. To stand before one is to come face-to-face
with a conundrum, a profound enigma in which every visual incident
covers over, cancels out, or destroys something that came before
it. Transforming the facts of history into occasions for sustained
contemplation, Ksiazek's paintings redeem the mad chaos and frightening
randomness of modern life by finding some freedom within it.
Monographic Publication: Wlodzimierz Ksiazek. Kouros Gallery,
New York, NY, September 12-October 12, 2002. Essay by David Pagel,
Introduction by Amy Ingrid Schlegel, Preface by Jason Andrew. Published
by Kouros Gallery, New York, NY |
