The dog turned out to be a fox
Marta Popławska in conversation with Jacek Obraniak
What was your first contact with art like?
I owe it to Miss Sylwia, who enthusiastically led the after-school activities in my primary school. She organised plein-airs; during the summer holidays, we followed in the footsteps of van Gogh. And since I was her favourite, being around art gave me joy from the start and stimulated my reward system. In my family, art was nothing strange to us. My parents do not make art professionally – they make clothes – but they graduated from the academy of fine arts. Their sensitivity and lack of discouragement strengthened my desire to try my hand at art. I visited museums in Poland and around the world. I didn’t fully understand what I was dealing with at the time; I felt it was beyond my intellect. But it was enticing. Because of the possibility of interacting with a world that was separate and yet permeated the everyday world. With worlds within the world. This resonated with my childhood need for fairy-tale like things. The icing on the cake were contacts with my parents’ friends, their art studios, permeated with that aroma of turpentine. It was a world of wonder different than the one I shared with my peers.
When did you realise you wanted to create such parallel worlds yourself?
I would say there were two stages. One is connected with the trips we took with Miss Sylwia. She fed us van Gogh in various ways, because he was her favourite. During a plein-air in the Pieniny Mountains, inspired by Vincent, we painted a village church, wooden, standing alone under a steel-coloured pre-rain sky. During a trip to France, we visited his grave. We sat all around, painting on our little canvasses, and Miss Sylwia told us stories from his life.
A great scene.
It was amazing, almost ritualistic. We not only heard about the artists, but we became them, in a sensually tangible way. I wanted to remain in that experience. In secondary school, the prognosis for my future was vague. The idea of going to the academy came up, I sighed up for preparatory courses. There were few takers, and sometimes when I came to the studio, I was alone. As I smoked, I absorbed those smells, nourishing my early school memories. I gained new access to the matter, I could shape it anew, in my own way. I wasn’t discouraged by painting still lifes because I began to understand it wasn’t just about reproducing the image I saw. To this day, I still use mainly figuration, but depicting something that actually exists is a pretext for me. I discovered that my expression is contained in a completely different layer than the depiction itself, that it is something other besides. That I was gaining access to a language that I could create myself, of course within the existing framework and codes of meaning. At the time, this was a formative awareness for me. I wanted more. There was also a completely mundane reason: I felt I was doing well; I was gaining recognition. Unlike in school, where I struggled to survive. This change was like a bolt from the blue.
You gained a feeling of agency. Or was there also the ability to cope with reality?
That’s how I see it. I reach for topics that fill my head, sometimes concerning the larger collective. I wish I could work them out and tame them. Be less afraid of them. But I know that this is, to a certain extent, just an act. It may draw someone’s attention, be a commentary, but it is not the hint of a solution. I consider sensitising to be an essential function of art. But I don’t delude myself that it is a form of activism that could achieve anything to change social attitudes. Sometimes I feel obliged to say something, but sometimes I feel that my comment might even detract from the magnitude of a situation or problem.
At the same time, you consistently raise issues that are major themes, such as war.
Yes, this is related to my fears and my desire to defuse them. First, there is the fear, then reaching for the subject that causes it. I should also say that these kinds of themes are attractive in formal terms; within them, I can build up certain tensions. By talking about a war, a catastrophe, if I am not talking about a specific conflict or event, I can create tension that also illustrates other fears. Of not being able to cope in life, of losing loved ones, of loneliness.
These are universal fears. Does it ever happen that the people who come across your art share their feelings with you, admitting that you have also addressed their fears? Do they find a kind of understanding or comfort in your art?
Surprisingly often. Every exhibition, I hear such a voice – or voices – that accurately name my intentions. Sometimes they even surprise me. They make me realise that I myself wasn’t fully aware of what I wanted to say, and a kind of complementation takes place. I am especially pleased when people who have nothing to do with the art world, who are embarrassed by its elitism, enter this world of mine and find themselves in it.
By taming fears, you reach into the repertoire of children’s fears, you operate with optics rooted in childhood.
Children’s fears are near and dear to me, there is a childish hyperbolisation in my pictures. It is simply about the fear of life. In the course of understanding various things, overwhelmed by the multitude of information, sometimes contradictory, a child’s fear is constantly within me. For me, art is about giving these fears an aura of magic to make them more bearable, less harsh and disappointing. Because life turns out to be more and more disappointing as I get to know it and against expectations. Behind the next door, there is no longer a colourful teddy bear, just a clerk’s office.
Or a brown bear. Speaking of animals: while you were working on the Łódź exhibition Toothless Wheels, you spoke about your move to the countryside, working in an old barn amidst farm machinery and over the skeleton of a dog in the cellar. The dog resonated with me. Apparently now the dog rests in the garden at the Broniewski villa. Every time I am there at the Museum of Literature, I can’t help but think of the dog.
The dog turned out to be a fox. It must have got into the cellar through a window, couldn’t get out, and over time became mummified. I'm not at the stage of moving out of the countryside. I couldn’t stand the lack of stimulus, the unsuitability of the raw spaces for creative activities. My parents moved out to the countryside when I was young. And although my friends would say that I was from the countryside, I only slept there. Education and any kind of event, it all took place in Łódź. I have negative memories associated with that. Coming back from school, I often sat alone, while my schoolmates could go out to play ball, just like that. During my university years, I returned to Łódź, lived in Dresden and Warsaw. Being aware of the cultural offerings available was important. At one point, while I was looking for a studio with my girlfriend, out of a longing for nature, we decided to taste the country life as adults. At first, I found it difficult to assimilate. But I put on a big exhibition and felt saturated by success and exhausted by city life. Then I spent a year in the countryside willingly and eagerly, settled there, and painted in peace. Now the lack of people has started to bother me, so I’m going through changes. The best thing would be a golden mean between the countryside and the city, being able to be here and there.
In terms of the city context and being rooted in it, a recurring motif in your works is that of the worker. Sometimes you style yourself as a worker figure, in overalls and flat cap. Why is this so important to you? Were you influenced by Łódź and its stories of the Lodzermensch, factories, and workers?
I do the styling consciously, referring to social realist art, which is compelling in its form. This involves stepping into the role of the artist as a worker, a person with a function, carrying out a service. I need this for dealing with imposter syndrome. The influence of the city is important, as I have repeatedly had studios in buildings built out of brick steeped in working class history. In the countryside, I was keen to draw on the contexts of the state farms, farm machinery as forms. These things, this infrastructure, attract me because, although there is a systemic soullessness, there is also a certain organicity, an ecosystem.
The city, the mass, the machine.
That's it. For me, Łódź, in its rundown state, with working-class industrialism, as a past world, is associated with something organic. Worn out, rusted through, its bricks and pavements meld with moss. This world provides a fertile backdrop for artistic activities. This is where my fascinations lie.
Hence the TYRA collective that you and Ignacy Tybor form
The name itself suggests that creative work, too, requires a great deal of meticulous toil. Except that, unlike labourers’ work, it’s voluntary and based on personal interest. Although it can be – and in my case is – devoid of hygiene, the kind you don’t leave.
So the strong feedback between life and work translates into your art? Do the circumstances dictate the form of expression?
Yes, if only because technique is dictated by where you are. Since I don’t feel like being in the countryside right now, I'm staying in a flat where I can’t make a mess or noise. So I’m at the paint stage. At the academy, I had access to printmaking studios, I was completely occupied with making lithographs and etchings back then. The conditions have continually shaped my work, but the base form is oil painting: the skill set is quite simple, because there are few objects, and the smells are not terrible. And it’s easier to use it to raise your standing with it rather than an improvised blob of rubbish – which is what I also create.
Collecting brings to mind non-professional art, which is one of your sources of inspiration.
Graffiti, art made by people excluded in various ways, rural ornamentation such as metalwork or shrine decoration – I see them as a creative need, taking pleasure in making them. They inspire me much like professional art. The main difference between the two is that the latter consciously quotes itself, uses references, while the former is focused on making a particular object. Lynch, Hasior, the Nowa Huta Group made me realise that painting can be spatial while remaining painting. As I said before, the element of identification is extremely important to me. The fact that I can identify as a painter gives me a sense of security. By attending the academy and creating a story about myself as a painter, I set a clear framework for how I function. A painter is one who has dirty trousers and paints on canvas. A sculptor is one who sculpts and has clay on their hands. And so on. Suddenly it became apparent that these roles could be intertwined, that you could also paint with matter. For example, by creating assemblages using found materials. Their structures and the values present in them can be an excellent starting point. The first note to which the entire piece is set and improvised around. Quite different from when you confront a blank canvas. That’s why I like to paint over my already finished pictures, and why I don’t like to paint on store-bought canvases. It’s not just about the price. When I stretch the linen myself, glue it in my own way, apply my own primer, there will always be an unevenness, a stain, something unexpected that will stimulate my thinking. Designing a surface is a rather psychotic activity. You have to choose so many aspects from your own boundless imagination: what, how, what forms, what materiality, structure, outline, lines, colours, what meaning it will carry – the number of variables is staggering. It’s easier to relate to a piece of sheet metal or a scrap of fabric, just as I relate to the shabby walls of Łódź or rusty gates, finding in the stories that have their own nobility, a past in the historical, literary, and formal sense.
That’s why I like to look in through gates, whether in Łódź or in Prague, to read the stories written in them.
If you don’t keep walking around a new housing estate, you can find many such stories in the city. I love the mountains – I love being there, looking at them. But I’ve tried more than once to tackle a mountain landscape painted from nature, and every time, it was a great big fiasco. Landscapes are a marginal thing for me, supplementary at most. It’s the city that has a tremendous vitality to it.
