"Loftiness against Impersonality"
Slawomir Marzec
The gallery BWA Lublin presents (February 2003) the exhibition that can be challenging at the moment, especially for the younger generation–it shows painting treated with an unusual seriousness. It is large retrospective of Ryszard Lis (1935—97), one of the most interesting–but still not sufficiently recognized–Polish painter. It is possible to see his works created mainly in the ‘70s and the ‘80s, which (despite the span of time) still keep this greatness, this pathos and strength of spirit which was emitted from the person of their creator (I had the honor, of knowing him personally).
Lis’s paintings evaluated through informel had been its initial and basic datum. Thus his art could be defined by the bizarre tissue of figures–their fragments and outlines, rhizomes of signs and symbols, words, pure painter’s gestures, dates etc., which balance on the borderland of losing own determinateness. This mysterious tangle, full of tearing associations, is written in wider structures–rhythms, symmetries, distinguished planes, which stratify, create inter/spaces, and often congeal to suggest landscape. The polisemic depth of these paintings is replenished by the differentiation of the pictorial matter: from heavy, carrying the birthmark of objectiveness relieves, to gesture made with glaze lightness. Brown colors, deep reds and grayness predominate here, but first of all the blackness–as Adorno said–the "negative apologue of heterochromia."
The crowd, the excess of different meanings and schemes, discloses the "the principal untruth of existence" (G. Marcel), which "postpones the impossible presence of sense" (J. Derrida). This creates situation, where any general meaning is not readily acceptable. Painting introduces us only into horizon of intuition; initiates us, as Heidegger would say, in definite vein. Only one thing here is readable and obvious–the magnitude and almost desperate pathos, which Ryszard Lis set against anonymity, impersonality of individual drama complicated in generality. Loftiness, which overcomes, or only compensates, the indifference of the world.
Lis understood art as an inalienable supplementation of our existence. "Therefore painting–(according to him)–is a kind of duel, which is always lost. But the value of painting is created by the dramatics and will of victory of the duel." And "thanks to art, in confusion of historical events, we can catch human voice."
The perceptible discipline and rigor of the paintings, writes down the spontaneous gestures into wider regularities. It associates with the pattern the repetitions as manifestation of trace, which restores the archetype nature of gestures. In my opinion, the most fascinating of Lis’s paintings is the cycle of "letters" To poet C. Norwid, where words, quotations come into view on the edge of legibility. They keep the equilibrium between the state of sign and gesture; they stratify in three-dimensional relieves, disappear in planes of blackness, or hang in the inter/spaces created by other words/signs.
The cycle Resignation, which resembles the shape of mail article, or a kind of letter, is thrilling too.
