'Boris Day'

                   

          

   

        

TEST CARD

The Testcard  cycle of paintings is a response in reaction to a new, highly abstract kind of social space, resembling virtual games, applications, and the technological word of microprocessors.

The widespread use of computers in the contemporary world does not foster a liberation from the feeling of alienation, to the contrary, it intensifies the impression of animation with respect to human reality. Freedom becomes locked in microprocessors and integrated circuits. And we are becoming more and more dependent on technology. We feel less, we are less sensitive, blinded by millions of impulses from the technological world. We are not prepared to receive art which we prefer to consume like we consume products in contemporary art centres, shopping malls, are so far removed from idealistic visions of modernistic "temples of art'.

Geometrical abstraction in the paintings is merged with the reality of contemporary television. The formal coldness and immobility are supposed to represent the future of the world, dominated by numerous artificially created divisions which strive to introduce an order. Therefore, there are allusions to pixel grids of a computer display, television screen, or the video game world. 

I paint the fluorescent stripes, geometrical figures, taking after a technological order. I regard geometrical forms to be codes, signs which I connect and disconnect entirely freely and arbitrarily. The colour is artificial, strong, irritating, applied with a roller or spray paint. I avoid the touch of a brush as a unique sign, the author's gesture. I bring individual character of my paintings to the minimum level.

Deconstruction and double coding in the “Testcard”

Deconstruction in my art is revealed by the change in meanings ascribed to geometrical art. I play a post-modernist game, based on deconstructing meetings, in this game I fluently cross between what is an element of reality, it's signs and pure abstraction. I merge in my paintings the geometrical art with everyday life. I am ironical about idealistic and humanist assumptions of avant-garde artists, I create the so-called cheap mysticism. 

I question old illusions about geometrical abstraction. 

Artificial fluorescent colours used in my art seemed to be a twilight of mystical radiation, a type of light which is  technological thanks to its artificial fluorescent colour, devoid of natural colour tone. The paintings, therefore, attack with aggressive colours, inflict pain, intensifying the feeling of void. Is there any room here for putting anyone into the state of mystical trance?

On the other hand, double colouring is expressed by alluding to modernist painting. I mix a high code, hinting also at the works of art of modernist masters, with a low code, popular, mass culture, which links work of art to everyday life.

This is the way in which I try to create a post-modernist painting, where different memories of images meet. The artistic performances do not send the viewer to any reality or individual imagination, only to certain signs. It is not an imitation of the real world, it is only in the imitation of its symbols. On the one hand, at the first contact with the painting, thoughts and associations appear, traditionally ascribed to this type of art. Geometrical abstraction seems to be detached from the surroundings, because it is governed by its own rules and principles. On the other hand, in the paintings there are clear references to the contemporary world. In this case, the “real element” is a popular testcard, a set of colours which we, contemporary people being part of post-industrialist society, are used to, or rather quite tired by it.

I, therefore, generate a shock of recognition, not a shock of novelty. I refer to a certain set of signs, existing  images, creating an impression of déjà vu. The paintings also quite apparently hint at modernist and minimalist art, for example, at Barnett Newman, Marc Rothko, Kazimierz Malewicz, Daniel Buren, Leon Tarasewicz or Piet Mondriane. 

Let us then define the “Testcard” as a fake of modernist abstraction, a pastiche created by means of a number of quotations from modernist painting, a game based on modifying the original significance by double coding. In this case, geometry ceases to be abstract. On the one hand, it brings about associations with modernist tradition, but on the other it counterpoints that tradition by making references to the reality. The testcard is known to everybody. Is this display panel, therefore, not a contemporary image of everyday life?

It seems that, at present, the only thing that an artist is left with is to play, and use irony. In the times when everything has been questioned, the only thing that makes sense is ironical distancing.

I use irony because I perceive it as a method of striving for truth. So I  assume an attitude of an ironist or a jester, described in the following manner by Leszek  Kołakowski: "the philosophy of jesters is the philosophy which, in every epoch, exposes as dubious everything that appears to be most unshakable, it reveals a contradiction of what seems to be self-evident and indisputable, it mocks the obvious common sense and sees virtue in the absurdities (...)". 'I agree and acknowledge that the irony of every generation is likely to become the next generation's metaphysics. Metaphysics is, so to speak, an irony which has become deflated, a public matter, a solidified vault, providing new background to enter new figures."

Karolina Majewska

 

 

“Testcard” is a reply to a question what art is, at present, in the author’s view. To a large extent the author analyses this matter in theoretical work (the fragment is quoted above), but a direct complement to the text and, in a sense, a portrayal of underlying thoughts presented in the text, is a set of paintings. The set consists of seven canvases of various sizes, including small, chamber size ones, and large format paintings. All are built around a kind of leitmotiv, the title inspired testcard, that is known to us all, the colour palette displayed when tuning the TV picture. Vertical rectangles of light spectrum merely change their magnitude or thicken in the rhythmic repetition. There are monochromatic planes, highly saturated with colour, covered with a single matt colour, as if torn from the garish colour scale of the main theme. Elsewhere the colour is he even "wiped out" so that only elements of exposing the structure remain, a grid structure of the planned composition. The entire formal aspect is brought to the simplest, even simple means, stripped of any illusion of space depth, and the content aspect is devoid of any narrative and narrowed up around one thread of associations. Such a "deconstruction" of the painting is, in view of the author,  the starting point for the creation of what  she calls the "double encoding", which is meant to be an ironic collision of the real world with  abstract thinking or, in other words, pastiche of “higher” art  by making references to everyday reality (which brings her work to Jakub Bąkowski’s). Reduction of form and content, the use of geometry, regularity of the testcard motif, and its relationship to the synthesis of knowledge about splitting white light, the shapes of, canvases, mainly derived from the square, or even exposing some of the paintings in the corners of the interior – all that is expected to hint at and create associations with Constructivism and works of mainstream geometric abstraction paintings. But what we get here is just a carbon copy, a "déjà vu" of the former, the "great" predecessors. At every step the author cast an ironical glance at the viewer, both by using unsophisticated creative methods such as spray, roller, marker, fluorescent colours stripped of pathos, and ideological impoverishment of art, alien to the higher art which ambitiously strives for expressing the essence of being, here ridiculed by the banality unpretentious main theme, devoid of symbolism.

Rafal Kowalski

TEST CARD

- Test card , 50x70cm, acrylic on canvas, 2014.
- 3 stripes , 50x70cm, acrylic on canvas, 2014.
- Grid , 170x170cm, acrylic on canvas, 2014.
- Gold of Egypt , 180x180cm, acrylic on canvas, 2014.
- Grid 2 , 160x160cm, acrylic on canvas, 2014.
- Test card 2 , 150x120cm, acrylic on canvas, 2014.
- 9 stripes on 9 stripes , 80x80cm, acrylic on canvas, 2014.