By Krzysztof Gliszczyński
Located in Salzburg, AT
Krzysztof Gliszczyński is Professor for painting on Academy of fine arts Gdansk.
The artwork is unframed and will be shipped rolled in a tube
Artist Statement
In the 1990s I started collecting flakes of paint – leftovers from my work. I would put fresh ones in wooden formworks, dried ones in glass containers. They constituted layers of investigations into the field of painting, enclosed in dated and numbered cuboids measuring 47 × 10.5 × 10.5 cm. I called those objects Urns. In 2016, I displayed them at an exhibition, moulding a single object out of all the Urns. The Urns inspired me to redefine the status of my work as a painter. In order to do it, I performed a daunting task of placing the layers of paint not in an urn, but on a canvas, pressing each fresh bit of paint with my thumb. In the cycle of paintings Autoportret a’retour, the matter was transferred from painting to painting, expanding the area of each consecutive one. Together, the bits, the residua of paint, kept alive the memory of the previous works. It was a stage of the atomization of the painting matter and its alienation from the traditional concepts and aesthetic relations. Thus, the cycle of synergic paintings was created, as I called them, guided by the feeling evoked in me by the mutually intensifying flakes of paint. The final aesthetic result of the refining of the digested matter was a consequence of the automatism of the process of layering, thumb-pressing, and scraping off again. Just like in an archaeological excavation, attempts are made to unite and retrieve that which has been lost. This avant-garde concept consists in transferring into the area of painting of matter, virtually degraded and not belonging to the realm of art. And yet the matter re-enters it, acquiring a new meaning. The matter I created, building up like lava, became my new technique. I called it perpetuum pictura – self-perpetuated painting. Alchemical concepts allowed me to identify the process inherent in the emerging matter, to give it direction and meaning. In a way, I created matter which was introducing me into the pre-symbolic world – a world before form, unnamed. From this painterly magma, ideas sprung up, old theories of colour and the convoluted problem of squaring the circle manifested themselves again. Just like Harriot’s crystal refracted light in 1605, I tried to break up colour in the painting Iosis. Paintings were becoming symptoms, like in the work Pulp fiction, which at that time was a gesture of total fragmentation of matter and of transcending its boundaries, my dialogue with the works of Jackson Pollock and the freedom brought by his art. The painting Geometrica de physiologiam pictura contains a diagram in which I enter four colours that constitute an introduction to protopsychology, alchemical transmutation, and the ancient theory of colour. It this work I managed to present the identification of the essence of human physiology with art. But the essential aspect of my considerations in my most recent paintings is the analysis of abstraction, the study of its significance for the contemporary language of art and the search for the possibilities of creating a new message. For me, abstraction is not an end in itself, catering to the largely predicable expectations of the viewers. To study the boundary between visibility and invisibility, like in the work Unsichtbar, is to ask about the status of the possibilities of the language of abstraction. The moment of fluidity which I am able to attain results from the matter – matter...
Category
Early 2000s Conceptual Art by Medium: Charcoal
