Painting as a Visual Reflection
Slawomir Marzec
Transmigrating Images," the most recent exhibition of Grzegorz Sztabinski at the Studio Gallery in Warsaw, presents works including paintings, drawings and installations, spanning his career. The names of his cycles are characteristic, thus allowing us to infer the horizon of the author’s interests, for example "Logical Landscapes," "Inter-Things," "Self-Quotations," "Cuts and Castoff Parts."
However, this show is more than a sheer attempt at a retrospective insight of the artist’s work. The title of the exhibition points to the value of, what the author defines as, images carried by paintings. Hence, there are important similarities; a kind of an ingeminate identity of what is transformed, re-contextualized or self-quoted. They mark out the arrangements of mutual references and comparisons.
Grzegorz Sztabinski is both a painter and a professor of philosophy. He is rather unique in Polish art. The otherness of artistic thinking does not depend on creative misunderstanding, but on the reliability of thoughts. Of course, this attitude eliminates an extreme and radically experimental action, for which it is not possible to take full responsibility.
The presence of reason its sublimations and above all the points of contact and correlation between reason and sensuality, intuition and feeling, constitute a framework for Sztabinski. According to him, painting is a form of thought, a kind of visual reflection. As he says "art teaches us to look and think." This attitude places him outside of the main scene of Polish art world, which is practically divided into two opposing groups of artists: tinkering men of forms and jugglers of meanings.
Sztabinski appreciates the distinctness and complementary aspects of different orders of thoughts, feelings or sensorial fancies, but he looks for the moments of their properness and equality or their inter-mediation. Maybe it is the echo of Bergson`s understanding of reality as the intersection of different orders? The thought process used in painting result in subdued art works, which improve concentration and deepened attention. Only then, it is possible to value orders internal complexities.
The essential matter of Sztabinski`s work is what joins or works as an intermediate with parts of reality. What conditions the similarities and differences, dependences and equalities; not indifferent, though very subtle tissue of between passages and reflexes. Sometimes the tissue is created by concepts, another time by intuition or sensorial enchantment. The artist, in defiance of prevailing convictions, keeps his belief in existence of reality, which is not only a product of rhetorical stratification.
Repetition is another important clue in the painter and philosopher’s art. Sztabinski features repetitions in different figures, either as the schematics of structures, cultural clichés or the only disposal to appearance. It is noticeable both in the tree’s ideograms in the cycle "Logical Landscapes," in the later iconic familiarity of modules of the composition, which lean and complement themselves in next accumulations, in the cycle "Inter -Things." This repetition acquires a special character in the strategy of self-quotations created in the 80s. The artist, referring to his earlier works, quoted their fragments.
I believe that Sztabinski`s creation can be situated between conceptual and geometrical art. It states a specific draught of actualization of their borderland. In many of his publications, the philosopher and painter, declares his affection to tradition of avant-garde, understood as a belief, in enlarging our conscious being in the world. However, it cannot be realized through perfecting a given isolated element, as we tend to assume today, but through vigilant and prudent displacement of their above-mentioned correlations.
Sztabinski remains strongly skeptical to the current, as he calls hyper-conformism or active conformity, searching for easy fulfillments, either on the level of simulation or to the processes of the redefining of art and the artist. He remains free of the pretences of political commitments, which is not easy today, when in some circles eating a hotdog is treated as an exclusively political act. Today, when charms of pseudo-deconstruction, which being infinite, in artists’ hands end up in the visions of the approaching end of every resolve.
In our time, when the subculture of ostentation and conformist immaturity this seems to be the only alternative to the whole culture, Sztabinski assumes an uncomfortable role of a mature and responsible artist.
