"Wlodzimierz Ksiazek's Paintings: Fictive Walls, Veiled by
Memory" by Richard Brilliant
A retrospective exhibition of Wlodzimierz Ksiazek's paintings since
1990 inevitably embodies a biographical subtext, not the least because
his paintings are so intensely personal. The decade contains the
artists transitional experiences in status from Polish exile to
American immigrant, from struggling artist in New York City to an
established presence in the gallery scene, from marriage and parenthood
to divorce and a painful deprivation of his daughter Veronika's
company. Ksiazek's remembrance of loss, infused with the pictorial
imagination of its continual re-experience, has revealed itself
in a series of paintings whose persistent sobriety enforces an impression
of fictive walls, confronting artist and beholder alike with the
power of walls to be ambiguously both exclusive and inclusive. Immediately
noticeable as fields occupied by significant marks, their mural
like surfaces are not quite opaque, or do they lack an underlying
structural order, gridded like a map whose surface features may
be obscured by three-dimensional elements that rise and fall above
or below the ostensible painted plane. Ksiazek has scored the paintings
with incised lines that cut through the plane, revealing what lies
beneath, while prominently establishing internal boundaries by broad
bands, like paths that pass over a rough terrain and thereby constitute
the visual evidence of the artist's assertion of control over his
medium, and over his imagery.
That control and the force of its application undergo considerable
change in the course of the 1990s. Ksiazek's work exhibits distinct
patterns of development within a framework of distinctive, even
persistent imagery, as if that imagery were so strongly attached
to his identity as an artist as to be inseparable from it. Works
from the first half of the decade seem experimental in character
and are painted largely in muted, if warm toned browns, punctuated
by flashes or patches of blue, rose, and yellow. A rectangular grid
that consistently underpins the paintings shifts from an overt structure,
more or less architectural in character to a more schematic, implicit
system of notation, obscured by skeins of color superimposed in
a manner deliberately resembling collage. Ksiazek briefly tried
to alter the grid by using round shapes, but this solution was soon
abandoned in favor of the adoption of strong diagonal swaths with
V shaped intersections, dynamic in their potential, that became
normative in many of his paintings after 1995/6.
Indeed, after 1995/6, these powerful diagonals were increasingly
emphasized, perhaps because they conveyed so effectively a sense
of energy, as the grid seemed to sink deeper into the paintings'
ground. Browns recede from view to be replaced by lighter coffee-cream-like
tones, enriched by touches, accents, and swaths of blue and more
recently of red. Collage-like effects assume greater prominence,
often in the form of irregular patches in light hues, whose coruscating
texture remains distinctive even over light grounds. The very insistence
of these diagonals and the swaths of mixed color can be intrusive,
even dominant, as if to reaffirm the operation of the artist's hand
in the work and the manifest presence of his strong feelings. Yet,
because most of the visual "action" takes place above
the median line of the paintings throughout the 90s, the focus of
attention draws the beholder in at eye level, to the maker's mark
and not to the surrounding field, thereby constituting that mark
at the core of the paintings meaning. Ksiazek sought in these abstract
paintings to create an imagery that would express directly the intense
states of his heart with such immediacy that these telltale marks
would manifest themselves as the signs of his making art as well
as his motives for doing so.
Perhaps, in the pursuit of such an ambition Ksiazek reveals himself
as a true Romantic. The vigorous gesture of his brush-stroke and
the pressure evident in the pathways of his palette knife must be
taken as intentional traces of deliberated action. They also bespeak
the existence of a controlled, if passionate impulse to make his
mark, quite different in kind from the casual, even accidental quality
of an unmediated graffito. And walls, even the simulacrum of standing
walls seems supremely suitable for the imposition of marks executed
with sweeping gestures that make the claim of possession.
As a late twentieth century Romantic, Ksiazek seems prepared to
express himself as a modern abstract artist whose representation
of self exists primarily in the reiteration of purposeful marks
which assert a particular identity, and secondarily in the development
and exhibition of an idiosyncratic technique of paintings as an
indicator of a personal style. That style exhibits some affinity
with other modern artists, perhaps most clearly in his reliance
on a partly geometrical structure or armature, coupled with multiple
strata of color, whose integrity is never complete, never extends
over the full surface of his canvases, hence is never comprehensible
either as under or over painting, but rather exists in constant
flux. The effect, reflective of the transparency of encaustic, an
ancient medium whose properties are much admired by Ksiazek, resembles
the mapping procedure adopted many years ago by Jasper Johns, whose
figuration attained so much of its authority by concealing, or denying
its representation of the familiar, whether of flags, or maps.
Ksiazek's imagined walls, marked by the passerby as well as by
the passage of time, seem, familiar but in unfamiliar ways. At first
densely opaque and only gradually less so, these fictive walls express
their natural materiality through the medium of texturized paint,
while they continue to bear the evidence of their own history, their
own coming-to-be since creation. Some viewers might see in these
paintings not walls but the representation of a barren landscape,
or a battlefield of World War I vintage, pockmarked by shell holes,
cut by trenches, speckled with pools of blood or reflections of
blue sky. To do so would prioritize descriptive over metaphorical
representation prose over poetry; it would inhibit unduly that stimulation
of vision not only inherent in "old walls" as a topos
of the imaginative power, exploited by artists since at least the
eighteenth century. Above all, Ksiazek's imagery ultimately transcends
its apparent invocation of a material entity in this world - a wall,
as we know walls to be - and transforms that reference into a temporal,
or historical metaphor, a whole creation of the imagination like
Shakespeare's wall in A Midsummer Night's Dream.
Walls that deny their real world existence except as figments of
the imagination constitute the surfaces upon which thoughts and
feelings can be transcribed, and projected. Ksiazek's walls, however,
possess a fundamental physical dimension: time. With his aid, the
viewer can penetrate like some archaeologist into an earlier state
of the work of art, as one stratum of paint is excavated to reveal
another underneath. The partiality of Ksiazek's technique of erasure
assures the preservation and visibility of the traces of prior existence,
in effect retaining thereby the memory of elements, or events, no
longer fully extant, but still recollected. For Ksiazek, an artist
who has experienced many losses and who incorporates his sense of
the past into his work, loss may be recouped by its reintegration
in works that stand in the present, as amalgams of his experience.
Memories decay. Their residue like the trace elements in these paintings
exists as shadows on what once was whole.
Another Polish exile, the great novelist Joseph Conrad, also understood
the role of shadows as levels and divisions of experience:
"To Borys and all others
who like himself have crossed
in early youth the shadow-line
of their generation with love'
The Shadow Line 1915
Monographic Publication: Wlodzimierz Ksiazek: Paintings 1990-2001.
The Gallery at the Barrington Center for the Arts, Gordon College,
Wenham, MA, and Alpha Gallery, Boston, MA, September/October 2001.
Texts by Richard Brilliant and Robert C. Morgan, introduction by
Bruce Herman. Published by Gordon College, Wenham, MA (ISBN 0-9707487-2-8;
Library of Congress # 2002449207) |
