The Disappearance of Certainty
Most likely, we are witnessing the end of a certain type of approach and understanding of art created by the generation of 25-30-year-olds.
The war in Ukraine has been going on for three years. The Second World War lasted five. Three years of unrest, uncertainty, doubt, is more than enough to lose faith in any rationality, whether of people or the world, this world. War, a close war, a war within reach, is all too real, all too tangible. This war cannot be ignored, avoided, bypassed. It has not brought many direct victims, but it has already changed a lot in terms of thinking. Certainty has been permanently taken away and it is most likely not to return.
The disappearance of certainty is inevitable.
The formula of hasty realism seems to describe well enough the world and worlds in which these moderately young people, artists, live. They are not on the threshold of adulthood, they have already lived in it a bit, to feel even more strongly that soon, this normality may end definitively and not return. The current war still has new faces and still surprises and dresses in ever-changing clothes, whether technical, ideological, or practical. Because it can be a hacker attack, or a small drone, not a big plane, or a single guy with a knife, not a whole army. For the irreversible loss of peace and the triumph of uncertainty, these are completely sufficient components, ensuring that the certainty of peace and normality will be increasingly difficult to experience. And it is terribly difficult to accept, but at the same time impossible to ignore.
Two young painters forming the TYRA collective admit in a conversation that they were united by a community of interests, a community of conversation. Conversation, although so valuable, is not a frequent phenomenon today, we rather monologue than talk and that with mutual understanding.
Jacek Obraniak and Ignacy Tybor paint in an unconventional way. Realistically – in principle, but at the same time not excessively. They take care in their painting not to be accused of excessive accuracy or pandering to the imagination of what a painting "should" look like. They care about their own version of their appearances. An aesthetic not overly aestheticized, but at the same time recognizable.
Jacek Obraniak lists among the important phenomena for him: Lynch, Hasior, the Nowa Huta Group, each of these references carries a different indication that can, I think, be found in these paintings.
Ignacy Tybor actually mentions one name and it may be somewhat surprising: Bruno Schulz. Jerzy Ficowski called his book about this writer and artist "Regions of Great Heresy" and something poetic and heretical can be seen in these paintings.
I see in these paintings the disappearance of certainty on many levels. Philosophers bless inconsistency and uncertainty, but is it good in everyday life? And uncertainty is certainly a component of the times we live in - the present times.
