“The exhibition is a dialogue with our Byzantine-Slavic mythology, but most of all, with the traditions and the mythologies of modern art,” says curator Jerzy Onuch of “Immersion,” an exhibition of works inspired by Byzantine art by seven Polish artists.
All the works, apart from two rooms of paintings by Jerzy Nowosielski, one of Poland’s most famous artists from the second half of the twentieth century, were created on-site, inside or just outside the dark vaulted galleries of the Center for Contemporary Art. This temporariness is evidently at odds with the notions of antiquity, or even transcendentalism, which is a theme commonly attributed in contemporary perceptions of Byzantine architecture and art, and Leon Tarasewicz, who has built a boxy yellow and clearly temporary structure of wood, presumably supposed to allude to the Golden Gate, outside the entrance to the gallery, is only the first artist to refer explicitly to the theme of time and of change which this contrast suggests.
In the middle of the wall of one of the gallery’s end rooms, Anna Plotnicka has hung a video of a man’s face being pushed into water. While the screen’s position in the middle of the wall, coupled with the image – that of an unidentified and typical man’s face pressed into a bowl of water – obviously suggest an icon, the presence within the video of change, in the form of movement, sets it totally outside traditional iconography, and suggests a different form of contemplation and of understanding: a video installation demands attention, in the literal sense that it moves before our eyes and in the sense that in a historicist age we expect an unfolding phenomenon to have meaning, meaning which is at least partially revealed in the course of time.
As instinctive historicists, whether we are rationalists or relativists, it is impossible not to see the exhibition’s two large rooms of works by Nowosielski in a historical light. His sparse images of naked or almost naked thin figures on brightly-colored backgrounds are firmly set in their times: who apart from a twentieth-century western artist would have been so inspired by the formality of the icon genre and so attracted to icons of pain and divine punishment?
While Nowosielski uses the formality of the icon together with the idea that icons can depict and evoke aspects of the human condition with a strength that, to normal mortals, often seems to verge on the abstract, Miroslav Maszlanko combines a concern with form with a more abstract form of suggestion. Nowosielski aims to elevate the human condition to objectivity and eternity through suffering and an appeal to the eternal, but the graceful structure which Maszlanko has created from grass and wax evokes a subjective experience and a subtly disconcerting sense of the transcendental and mysterious.
The structure is graceful and delicate, a mostly bulbous form suspended, somehow, from the ceiling, and filling most of the room. Its shape is almost totally abstract, and the only element of the work which suggests Byzantium or anything else is the smell of the beeswax which joins the stalks together, yet it is profoundly evocative, and as unsettling as it is striking and physically amazing. It’s not clear how it’s suspended from the ceiling, the form as a whole is strangely uneven, the gaps between stems of grass vary disconcertingly in size, and most strikingly of all, the structure does not really fit in the room: it not only takes up a larger proportion of the space in the gallery than we are accustomed to, but its curves also suggests a continuation of the form beyond the gallery’s walls, as though the walls of the gallery have cut off a section of an existing phenomenon.
“Immersion”
Center for Contemporary Art
2 Skovorody, Metro Kontraktova Ploshcha, 238-2446.
Through July 11
Open daily from 1 p.m. to 6 p.m.
