The world will never end

„The world will never end” is the title of the exhibition, and it sounds like a good omen or a spell filled with optimism. This paraphrase, taken out of its original context, that is A Song on the End of the World by Czesław Miłosz, could easily be the climax line uttered by a heroine or a hero in a drama or a film script. This association does not seem too far fetched from where we stand. After all, the exhibition presenting artworks by Alicja Bielawska and Krzysztof Wróblewski should be considered a kind of conversation. A conversation that borders on a polemic, reflecting the superficially distant points from which the two artists view reality. Their dialogue takes a non-verbal form – visual statements, such as paintings, objects, installations, fabrics. And upon closer inspection, we can easily see the fellowship that arises somewhere in-between the works created according to different methods employed by the artists.

Alicja Bielawska focuses her interests on everyday occurrences. Yet her detailed observations often take simplified forms venturing far from their original sources. The artist uses a characteristic visual language whose strength lies in its sensitivity and its sensorial power to influence viewers. The existing space or architecture becomes as important to her as color and form. Bielawska seems to work mainly in relation to the space – she surrounds a pillar in the exhibition space with her textile installation, entitled At This Time of Day Even the Shadows Are in Color (2018), and in the middle of the space she places a set of works, entitled Sleeping Trajectories (2020), resembling a spatial drawing. The performative potential of it is emphasized by the very fact that the installation was initially the focal point of actions involving female performers. Bielawska once again animates her artwork by inviting Dana Chmielewska who prepared a premiere choreographic performance for the Günter Grass Gallery in Gdańsk.

More than in the process of visual perception itself, Alicja Bielawska is interested in externalizing the experiences confined within the boundaries of our body. Attempting to share them and search for alternative methods of perceiving reality has recently become a fundamental issue in her work. Georges Perec wrote about playing with space, for example, by pointing your little finger at the sky to get a solar eclipse, or taking a photo of yourself holding the Leaning Tower of Pisa[1]. Bielawska seems to play similar games with perception and space, treating it like a palimpsest, and overwriting it with brilliant arrangements of her works in various surroundings.

Krzysztof Wróblewski appears to do the opposite – to him, an image is the basic form of describing the world, and he considers the multitude of images a set of messages received from the environment. In the works presented at the exhibition, prepared with this presentation in mind, he transfers visual experience to reproducing reality by means of painting. However, he is not interested in a realistic visual narrative. Science is his starting point which he attempts to bend, like a fierce researcher, and move into the field of visual arts, developing the subject with his own compositional solutions. He translates his view of space into sequences of geometric figures – the patterns obtained in this way are constrained by mathematical structures and permutations, referring to those created by Roger Penrose. They take on modular relief forms built from a combination of ten- and twenty-sided shapes. The artist’s latest works are not only a continuation of his own practice, but a response to Alicja Bielawska’s proposals. He incorporates the fragmentary, limited condition of our perception into his works, bringing to mind the words of the above mentioned Perec: „Space is what arrests our gaze, what our sight stumbles over: the obstacle, the bricks, an angle, a vanishing point. Space is when it makes an angle, when it stops, when we have to turn for it to start off again. There’s nothing ectoplasmic about space; it has edges, it doesn’t go off in all directions, it does all that needs to be done for the railway lines to meet well short of infinity”[2].

In addition to Penrose tiling, Wróblewski employs Stanisław Ulam’s method of imaging prime numbers, while creating his paintings. He uses the spiral developed by the Polish mathematician to make fractal compositions, such as in the painting Spiral 2 (2019/2020) from the No Quick Response series. The title of the series suggests inquisitiveness contained in Wróblewski’s method, and the conviction that there are no simple answers. It should be noted that the artist’s creative process resembles a visual experiment – he reads images of everyday life as well as historical paintings by applying mathematical and physical principles. Following the words of Władysław Strzemiński, that an artist does not let visual experiences pass futilely – they carefully analyze what each of them means and what part of reality it corresponds to[3].

In the meantime, somewhere between the neurophysiological, mathematical reflection of  Wróblewski, and Bielawska’s sensorial, emotional retrospects and games, a common ground of their interests becomes clear. It is the experience of everyday life getting translated into metaphors, non-representational forms and simplified figures. What makes the artists’ dialogue dynamic is the assumption that the artworks remain in the constant state of becoming – being constituted by ways of looking and their correspondence with the gallery space. The focus on the surrounding reality as well as the artists’ affirmative attitude towards it suggest that the structure of the world may rise beyond the common understanding of time and space. The limits of our knowledge presented in this way make the phrase „there will be no end of the world” become more convincing, for a moment at least.

Franciszek Smoręda

[1] Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, Penguin, London 1998, p. 85

[2] Ibidem, p. 81

[3] Władysław Strzemiński, Teoria widzenia (Theory of Vision), Wydawnictwo Literackie, Kraków 1958, p. 13