Proust is my growing remorse
Marta Popławska in conversation with Ignacy Tybor
MP: You paint, you write – where does your love of creating come from? Was it something you learned in your family home?
IT: As much at home as no one made it difficult for me. I had been interested in creative activities for as long as I can remember. And then the moment came when I had to decide what to do in life. There was no single impulse. The most important thing was that our home was a reading home. The sight of my parents reading made reading obvious.
Were there formative books?
Not really formative, but there is The Cinnamon Shops that I keep coming back to, because of the language. I like when something is beautifully written, in exuberant language. Although I like simple language, too.
In your texts, you’re able to operate with both, ascetic language and the intricate, enigmatic one.
I have a tendency for the latter, but I do try to simplify it because I have a sense of excessive pathos, of exaggeration.
Do you hold back because of your readers?
More because of myself. There is a story of mine, ‘Dziadek wąż’ [Grandfather Serpent] in which the narrator was created so that I wouldn’t have to hold back in any way. Sometimes I feel like my work is overdone. But I’ll probably get over that soon.
Does this involve a stage of searching?
That’s my hope. It would be awful if I had already found something, because what would I do then, especially as I am still quite young.
What year were you born?
1999.
Is the medium of words as a form of expression as important to you as the picture
I graduated in fine arts, where there is very little word; nowadays, the word is a supplement for me. Hence the importance of titles, which are usually created after painting. I read as much as I watch. I feel more shaped by language than by images. I don’t think in images, but in words. I realised quite late that other people aren’t like that. And when someone says they are visualising something, they’re being serious, not just using a figure of speech. I developed this skill, too, ever since I realised, I could do that. So, I know how to imagine things. But the word is what is natural for me.
Proust appears in your texts. Why him?
Proust is my growing remorse.
Because you haven’t read all of In Search of Lost Time? My ebook reader froze up on it completely.
I don’t blame it at all. I make another attempt every six months; each time, I get further and further. In one of his essays, Ryszard Koziołek talks about how, when you’re a reader, to have to truly realise that a thing was written by someone. In reference to Proust, this is how I understand it: he was a human who existed, who, in writing, performed an enormous labour, and that is extremely impressive. He performed the act of writing; we interact with the effect. Just as I am a man sitting down to work, and everything I do has to go through me. I’m reading Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian right now. I don’t know how much truth there is to it, but I’ve heard that at one point, he was writing four books at the same time: every day for eight hours, two hours each. And that, to me, is a work ethic.
Incredible discipline. Is it also important to you?
I think it’s the most important thing for me. Hence the name of the collective I co-created with Jacek Obraniak, whom I met during our studies, at a plein-air. We were stimulated by our conversations, which turned out to be very valuable. It’s rare to meet someone you can talk with about your work and feel that the other person understands. It was an acquaintance for a long time, until our first joint exhibition in our city, at the Łódź Abstract Art Festival.
TYRA – from tyrka [Polish], hard work?
Yes. We named the collective this way so as not to use a name that was too pompous. It’s a little wordplay, but we also wanted to convey treating creativity like work.
Does this work involve responsibility? You emphasise it as an important aspect in the text that accompanied your collective exhibition ‘TYRA at LAAF: Crystal tower of formalism. Doubt in the form of an exhibition.’ On the one hand, it talks about responsibility as a privilege, the source of life satisfaction, on the other, the cause of anxieties and a form of burden.
What I had in mind there was not social responsibility, but an extremely personal one. If you work creatively and take it seriously, that imposes a responsibility on yourself not to waste potential.
So your work ethic is fully formed?
I develop it as I go, sometimes for better or worse. It’s better when the sun is shining, worse in November.
Do you use any self-motivation tricks?
I simply try to approach creative work like any other work. Eight hours a day, five days a week. My work brings me pleasure. The more I have to do, the more pleasure I have. The less I have, the worse I feel. I could probably cope with this somehow, talk to someone about it, but that’s the mode that suits me. Although I imagine if I worked in a corporation, I probably wouldn’t be telling you such nonsense.
There was a transition in your work from abstraction to figuration.
This is my personal opinion, maybe it’s the other way around, but for me, abstraction was a kind of safe space. Narrative invites conversation, but not necessarily on your own terms, and meanwhile, you can only talk about formalistic things formalistically. That’s what I think. It gave me a certain comfort, and leaving it was fun. At the same time, nothing prevents it from being completely different in six months’ time.
There are a lot of tangled bodies in you works, struggles, conflict – when did such motifs come from?
I treat art as a catalyst for what’s in the back of my mind, an opportunity to talk things out. At the same time, I don’t want to strike a moralistic tone. While I’m painting, I listen to conversations about politics in the background. Most of the topics discussed are not positive, because that is the reality. And this stays inside you, looking for an outlet, and you want to paint it out. My diploma work was titled The Inconceivably Long War and was about real human tragedies, ones I am fortunate not to experience. But for me, the fight is the daily struggle with the things we talked about: matter, work ethic, my own resistance. Thus the hyperbolic, and also slightly ironic, title.
I get the feeling that when you look at the world, you smile half-heartedly at it.
If we look at the world ironically, it should be self-irony, otherwise we are committing an injustice.
Irony as a form of defusing the emotional charges you mentioned?
Yes, which is why it should work both ways. If you treat external matters ironically to defuse them, and you lack self-irony, then you yourself remain undefused. Treat yourself too seriously, and you could explode.
