Everything And All: Slawomir Marzec at Varsovian Gallery

The Varsovian Gallery Foksal, one of the most important places for art in Poland, presented an exhibition of of Slawomir Marzec’s work during March and April. For almost ten years, the artist has been using the word “All/Everything” to title his artworks, as well as his exhibitions and theoretical-critical publications. According to him, it is “all/everything” that should be the main theme of art. And this is the best introduction to the cardinal problem nowadays: the impossibility, and yet the necessity of the whole; and the fragmentariness of every concrete. This implies a paradoxical logic, which as the only one, may attempt to match a reality understood as a dynamic complex multi-dimensionality.      

We can notice this paradox in every section of the exhibition entitled “All; and 12 paintings.” In the small hall leading to the gallery room was a film, the topic of which is the invisibility, the impossibility to see and understand. The whole consists of 25 different films, put one on top of another in equal proportions as well as longer sequences of flickering single-framed images. From time to time, we catch a glimpse of particular faces, figures or words, which disappear instantly. Moreover, the author appears on the screen at frequent rhythmic intervals, uttering the word: “all” – each time in a different way. At the end, it turns out that the whole movie was a video-clip set to one of Mozart’s sonatas. Although at times the music is muffled, seems unimportant or simply absent, its length matches precisely the length of the film.       

The exhibition room of the Foksal Gallery is filled with 12  similar – almost identical – paintings hung on two opposite walls. Each of them is built of tiny points of ‘all colors’ and works almost like a screen for appearing and disappearing of shapes and figures. We can virtually ‘see’ anything there, that the viewer might imagine.           

It is impossible to define or even perceive the distinctness among these paintings. Their otherness poses a challenge for us. Upon closer examination, however, we notice what makes the paintings different: there is a title, written in pencil, on the wall right above every single painting. The titles are either original Latin proverbs or pieces of the Internet news in basic English (from the day when a given painting was completed). These specific ready-titles represent two conflicting paradigms of time; the dispute between universalism and topicality (fullness and fragmentation). The reference to time is also clearly seen in the number of the paintings (12). They are differentiated by small objects attached to the thick side edges of the pictures. Each of them is a unique frame, or a parergom. We can see there some little stones, coins, cuts, pieces of cloth and the like.

The paintings are placed very closely to each other (every 12 cm). Therefore, we do not know if this is one painting or a series of paintings. Or whether the spaces between them are cuts or borders. The farthest paintings on both sides are placed equally close to the neighboring walls as well. So, is this the limit or just the moment prior to transformation? The wall is covered with all the titles of the paintings but presented in illegible simultaneity. On the opposite wall this illegibility changes practically into invisibility, as the same titles are written in white chalk on a white wall. It begs the question: are the titles relevant or the ‘entirely formal’ spaces between them, repetitions, accumulation or simultaneity? Are the imperceptible formal conditions which make our understanding and emotions real and visible, ultimately important?

The exhibition is a special treaty on painting and visibility. Marzec takes here (as he does in his theoretical publications) the discussion of the current concept of the picture. His critical references to the idea of parergom (Kant, Derrida), screen (Lacan), repetition (Deleuze), palimpsest (Lyotard), cut/tear (Didi – Huberman) and too others are clearly visible here. By no means does the artist, however, reduce art to pure philosophy.  Rather, sensorial and even meditative aspects of art are important to him as well.   

Slawomir Marzec locates our awareness on the level of deep subtleties, in the sphere where virtually no events take place, on the edges of our visibility and at the moments of emerging of this awareness. Because he is convinced that the contemporary ‘apocalypse’ happens almost soundlessly at the periphery of our inattention and/or incomprehension.