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This small but forceful exhibition at the
Art Alliance presents six new paintings by Wlodzimierz Ksiazek
(pronounced shawnshek), a politically active Polish artist who
has lived in the U.S. since fleeing martial law in 1982. The paintings
offer huge fields of paint rigorously treated with small events:
scratches, gouges, scabs that have been picked at. Their stark
concreteness relates to certain abstract paintings (I think of
Franz Kline, Antoni Tapies, and Anselm Keifer) that have the actions
of the artist recorded in pure form and pigment.
My first impression of Ksiazek's paintings,
seen from a distance, was of their profound emptiness and silence.
All of the paintings are untitled and are distinguished only by
their dates and dimensions. This feature serves to heighten their
identity as ordinary objects in the world, possessing no meaning
other than their physical attributes. If it's true that, as someone
once told me, the title is the light that the artist holds up
to illuminate the work for the viewer, then these untitled paintings
are intended to be experienced in the dark, without the aid of
language, like a wall we bump into on our way to somewhere else.
But within their mute walls of paint,
there are metaphors hidden. And it is the work of each viewer
to travel along the surface and dig up meaning. I began to see
Ksiazek's paintings as vast fields of earth, alternately fertile
or barren, in which the artist works with paint: plowing, leveling,
scraping, digging and piling. Up close, the precise dramas of
their material qualities and physicality offer lots of little
surprises and even, here and there, a hidden voluptuousness. One
big painting, Untitled, 2002 (78 inches by 90 inches) is
made from massive quantities of Naples yellow oil paint, and its
whole surface has been plastered with textured slabs of paint,
angular exfoliated sections and additions to the surface such
as irregular rectangles of reapplied, dried paint and a few dabs
and splatters of red paint. One particularly thick area of paint
reminded me of a frosted sheet cake with a lick out of it.
Another large painting, Untitled, 2002 (49 inches by 60
inches) presents a monochromatic field of blue. It appears to
be an unpleasantly cloying shade of baby blue, but after standing
in front of it for a while I noticed that the color has been subtly
neutralized by its opposite, pushing it slightly into a minor
chord. Other effects, such as thick areas of paint scraped down
to bare canvas and showing pieces of letters (useless fragments
of language), a wet blue wash and thick areas of impasto with
smooshed and troubled surfaces -- perhaps the imprint of a kiss
-- add to the physical complexity of the encounter.
The small paintings in the exhibition
are just as monumental in their scope, beautifully evoking space
and landscapes. In the oil and encaustic on panel painting, Untitled,
2002 (12 inches by 16 inches), Ksiazek manipulates a restricted
palette of dirty white, gray and pale blue. This abstract surface
obliquely suggests a vast landscape: a grimy urban scene or dirty
snow-covered fields, tire tracks, muddy water and patches of reflected
sky. In another small painting, Untitled, 2002 (30 inches
by 34 inches), the artist has incised marks -- like receding lines
in a perspective drawing -- into a field of ivory paint that create
a serenely classical place. Nestled into this framework, little
bits and dabs of deep red-violet and pinkish-orange paint, like
glimpses of the setting sun or magma within the earth, add to
the intensity of the physical sensations more audaciously than
any other piece.
Ksiazek's paintings have provoked a lot
of extremely interesting critical writing, which may, in truth,
be an unnecessary prop to the paintings' silent eloquence as real
objects. At their core these are purely physical, dumb, soundless
paintings -- blank slates (almost) to which we can bring our own
experiences and sense of physicality. These six paintings offer
great rewards to the patient viewer.
Reproduced courtesy of the Philadelphia
City Paper
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