A painting – a record – a conversation – a meeting
Let us start with a single painting. I stand in front of a canvas full of colours. I see blue, red, I try to follow a black line, I start to notice shapes. Or maybe I am just imagining them…
The painting is one of the Mental Labyrinths by Maciej Przybylski, the most disturbing one. There are other works – canvases, papers, densely filled, a horror vacui of sorts. I follow them. I listen to the conversation.
The paintings by Maciej Przybylski are a conversation, or rather multiple conversations. The first one is the conversation of the Artist with himself. The conversation is recorded on the canvas, in form of colours and lines, expressed in the roughness of the texture. The Artists feels and is in dialogue with himself, with his own thoughts, experiences, emotional states. A painting is a filter through which we can get to know him.
The works are also a conversation with the art of painting, with its matter, to be precise: with texture, colour, strokes of the brush, smoothing, but also with the search for harmony and a suitable perspective. A conversation very often closed within the favourite format (2x1,60 m), covering the area of personal space, not to appropriate too much of it. One of the participants in the painting dialogue is the tradition – important representatives of the expressionism in painting. There is Wassily Kandinsky, his significance of the colour, the relationships between music and painting, compositions…
We notice dialogues with other 20th century expressionists - de Kooning, Pollock, Gorky. Those conversations are not held in form of quotations or copying. Przybylski’s art shows the awareness of their existence, the knowledge of the history of the art of painting, an in-depth analysis with simultaneous conviction of going forward. Sometimes, one has the feeling of cold and chill, a geometrical distance, in particular in the cycle Polyphonies and Polyrhythmics, but it is only a visual façade, hiding painted out emotions and thoughts. Let us not forget that the author is also a musician, so the search for a kind of order or harmony, striving for, even or maybe especially, a multi-tonal unity is a natural creative process.
I wonder one can call it straightforward a synthesis…
A painting is a record. A record of the given time. Like a photograph. But it is not a fixed snapshot, a moment killed in stillness, but an ongoing process – a painting can be changed, improved, destroyed…
A painting is also a specific record of perception taking place inside of us, following of the line, colour, search for punctum. The paintings by Maciej Przybylski are our conversation as well – the one of the spectators. We stand among them, let them hold us and possess us. Affect us. We want so much for them to talk to us. We want explanations and clarifications. A dictionary to interpret them. What should go into such a dictionary? We are looking for deciphering codes. Quick comprehension tips. Maciej’s paintings are not quick. They require us to stop, take a break. They are difficult to put into words, they escape. As any significant artistic statement, they leave a mystery behind. A place for understanding during every individual reception. Art does not need complete interpretations, if we were able to describe everything, art would become redundant.
Standing among the works by Maciej Przybylski, let us become seduced by them and open our minds to different associations – it can be a memory of a landscape, a specific location, maybe a person, a relationship, feeling related to them, or a memory of a moment, a lasting one, a passing one, maybe the passing itself…
An association with a photograph emerges on one more level of interpretation. French semiotician Roland Barthes, writing about interpretation of photography, distinguished between two layers of studium and punctum. In the case of Przybylski’s paintings, one can also talk about studium – following the culture, the recognized and named states, emotions, and punctum – the search for a more personal, individual element, the one which attracts us, which attracts me. For me, it is the shape of a circle – found in many works, I look for it in other canvasses. Do not always find it.
In the intense paintings by Przybylski, colour definitely keeps playing an important role – varied blues, thickened or diluted as air, orange spots crossing the lines, bands of red traces. Symbolically, this is lightness, spirit, freedom, life. Let us look for other associations and meanings. Or maybe just stop. Be. Listen to the paintings.
Mental Labyrinths, Polychromies and Polyrhythmics invite us to a conversation, focused and full of the art of painting.
