The tradition of the visual has often overlapped with the inexpressible, and the confrontation was sealed by the “anarrative” modernist art.

The title of the exhibition, which in Polish triggers association with dumbness or infant babble, refers to Tadeusz Miciński’s esoteric work from 1910 – Nietota. The Mystic Book of the Tatra Mountains. The author used a word which commonly described lepidodendrons, an extinct genus of tree-like plants from 300 million years ago. As folk superstition had it, especially in the Carpathian Mountains, they possessed magical powers.

However, it is difficult to explain Miciński’s motivations when using the tradition of witchcraft in his visionary novel. Given the author’s personality, whose literary rendition can be found in one of the novels by Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, he was not driven solely by ethnographic fascinations. The use of the neologism in the title of the book referred to a state of “non-sense” and infirmity, and to the habit of not using proper names, which is reflected in the strong belief in sympathetic magic, and indirectly – in the supernatural power of representation.

As the French philosopher and sociologist Edgar Morin claimed, in the old days there was no distinction between technology, magic, religion and art. While drawing on the relationship between art and the inexpressible, and the connections between artistic and magical practices, the exhibition simultaneously raises the problem of the persecution of antisocial individuals, and indirectly – the aestheticisation of violence, which is present in the theatre-like setting of witch trials.

The belief in the existence of secret knowledge and invisible powers is still widespread, irrespective of the technological advancement of civilisation. By modelling and representing reality, transmuting matter, the mystic aspect of the abstract, the performative character of gesture and the intertwining of mimesis and hermetic symbolism, the artistic practice penetrates many spheres of human spirituality. The exhibition feature paintings, videos, objects and installations referring to those matters.                                                                                                                                                                                                                        Łukasz Huculak

 

fot. Małgorzata Kujda, © Muzeum Współczesne Wrocław, 2018

 

The 16 th edition of the SURVIVAL Art. Review will take place in the old palace of the Wallenberg- Pachaly family. Due to the history of the building, its former function (the seat of the Comerzbank), and the current value (as a cultural and financial asset), the motto and subject of this year’s edition of the Review is Capital. During the Review, the palace will become the venue for the presentation of several dozen artworks made in different media (painting, sculpture, sound installation, video, etc.) by artists from Poland and abroad. The main exhibition featuring artworks selected by means of an open competition will be accompanied by special projects.

ˮIn spite of the huge funds spent each year by the Russian billionaire Dimitri Itskov or by Google on research into immortality, we are still equal in death. Imitating a late 19th-century relic, the destructed portrait of the former owners of the bank and palace – Carl Gideon Gotthard von Wallenberg-Pachaly and his wife Helena – serve the role of a painterly attempt to recreate the aura that used to permeate these interiors.”                                                                                                                                               Paweł Baśnik

 

fot. Małgorzata Kujda, 2018

 

 

Everything that is alive must die sooner or later. This obvious conclusion can be easily made by observing the world around us. The fact that every life stretches in time towards death is a universally known truth. So I will also die, just like everyone else who lived before me. I know this and, at the same time, I cannot believe it – me, who is watching this world, me who breathes and thinks, will soon leave for emptiness and nothingness. Should I be afraid of this black hole, which I am inevitably approaching?
meditating on one’s death is associated mainly with a traumatic premonition of the end of one’s individuality. If consciousness is nothing more than the biological function of the brain, all my subjective, first-person and qualitative world of experience will eventually pop like a soap bubble. The psychic continuity which builds the sense of self will vanish forever with the last breath.
Is it possible, then, to find a way to cancel the sentence that biology has given us? The scientific community is boldly proclaiming that the “Promethean dream of medicine” will soon be fulfilled. According to some predictions, the first man who reaches immortality has probably already come into the world. Genetics is the area of ​​research in which the greatest hope is placed, but parallel solutions are being sought based on the latest digital technologies, which is explained by the installation made with a steam projector presented below. Transhumanists like Ray Kurzwail make bold predictions that the twenty-first century will be a century in which successive scientific discoveries and technological inventions will lead humanity to the so-called singularity which will force us to redefine everything that is included in the concept of humanity. Human evolution will accelerate in every possible aspect, but it will not be a biological evolution but a technological one. It is a man who will control its course using his own tools. Indeed, we are already witnessing this phenomenon.                                                      Paweł Baśnik

 

fot. Grzegorz Stadnik, 2018

 

Paweł Baśnik, a Painting as a relic of personal consciouseness (excerpt)

  ,,Consciousness seems to be an absolute condition by which ‘something’ changes into ‘someone’. It makes a given piece of matter become a person who knows about his existence and differentiates himself from the rest of the universe. In turn, the relic, in the cultural context is understood as a product of bygone eras, which has retained its form, changing the initial functions over time. In the biogeographical context, however, it means small groups of organisms that have survived in a small area, maintaining continuity with species that became extinct in previous epochs. The painting understood as an artifact, although it belongs to the inanimate world, is a product that in a special way reflects many aspects of mind and corporeality. Consciousness disappears with the death of the body, but the painting becomes a kind of remnant of the creative mind, and indirectly also of other people, places, objects that were in the field of its consciousness and were included in the work. However, the extent to which the painting can save us is subject to various mechanisms and verifications, from the physical survival of the work to the power of cultural and social influence.”
The exhibition presented paintings that are vanitative not so much in the presented motif and illustrative layer, but in the paint and the painting method itself, which does not try to cover up, but even more emphasize the organicity and corporeality of the medium which is painting.                                                                                                                                                                              Paweł Baśnik

Łukasz Huculak, Ktoś Inny. Thoughts on the works of Paweł Baśnik

Jerzy Nowosielski, making no secret of his fascination with the art of Francis Bacon, has repeatedly found the emanation of evil (Satan) in his paintings. Many people have a similar perception of death or black metal – and that’s what Baśnik is listening to.
Similarly sinister atmosphere has a long tradition in painting – from medieval purgatories, through Bosch, Monsu Desiderio, to the black paintings in the Quinta del Sordo. Bacon himself could patronize last year’s exhibition of the Krakow group Wprost, and not only in the direct references of Zbylut Grzywacz. Note the splitting of Waltos’ bodies, Bieniasz’s distortions or Sobocki’s bold textures. Just before their exhibition at the Manggha Museum, in the nearby MOCAK, we could also see Medicine in Art. Both exhibitions boldly reveal the affinity of impastos and meat, spongings and skin so close to Bacon, and also known to Rembrandt (portrait of de Lairesse).
  Generally: paint and body. The paint materials owe their mimetic properties primarily to the oil technique. However, the mimetic potential of pigments was already used in the ancient epoch of Fayum coffin portraits, painted with the encaustic technique, which is considered a prototype of a modern portrait (in Manggha one can see the “coffin” portraits of Sobocki). From the moment when art dealt a bit more with existential questions, since it complemented its symbolic functions with the ability to recall absentees, the imitative potential of organic binders became priceless.
  These properties are explored by Baśnik, first evoking the presence of his characters, and then revealing their physical impermanence. This is not a purely formal procedure, it is not just about a visual effect. Like with Bacon, Sobocki, and earlier anonymous Fayum painters, Ghirlandaio portraying the old man’s wart-studded face, Giorgione painting his “old lady” or Viennese secessionists, it is about capturing a certain flaw, for some its beauty, for others: the drama. The questions of those painters are coming back today in the mainstream of new painting, in the bold use of paint and the painting destruction of Alexander Tinei, Adrian Ghenie, Michael Borremans and Markus Schinwald. They and Baśnik have one accessory in common: photo (presence) and the belief that there is a difference between a paint that expresses something directly and the paint that expresses it by illustration. Photography is a phantom, and paint reveals the truth, affecting the nervous system directly. Bacon painted, always using his photos and mirror simultaneously. There are not one Bacon on his self-portraits – there are many, multiplied, touched, blurry and fuzzy: I’m someone else. What do we see in Paweł Baśnik’s works? The eye is caught by the contrast between the solemn, noble poise, calmness and stiffness of the poses, and the dramatic nature of the damages revealing the inside of the body, the bottom of the face, someone else there – underneath. Baśnik began with painting, sometimes “aged” portraits and drawing studies, in which he experimented with the physiology of perception, splitting the picture into several overlapping and disorienting figures. In both these practices, on the one hand, the painterly tendency to emphasize materiality, and, on the other, the need to disturb the image – the dematerialisation of the presented object – permeated each other. Recent paintings intrigue the viewers with the combination of these searches; the power of their expression is built on the opposition of presence and absence, and perceptual flaws and destruction reveal the paradoxicality of visibility treated as a testimony. In The Trouble With Being Born, Cioran notes: if we could truly see ourselves the way others see us we’d disappear on the spot.                                                                                                                                                        Łukasz Huculak

 

fot. Miron Mattoszko, 2017