"Wlodzimierz Ksiazek's Resistant, Resilient Paintings"
by Amy Ingrid Schlegel
Wlodzimierz Ksiazek's intensely complex; untitled paintings of
the past twenty years, since his arrival in the United States from
Poland as a political refugee, have consistently provoked discussion,
debate, and, now, a discourse of multivalent meanings and competing
interpretations. It is hard to walk away from Ksiazek's large-scale
paintings, to dismiss them out of hand as too difficult, too obscure,
or too expressionist. Serious viewers are compelled to linger and
look hard, to try to penetrate the enigma of his intensively worked
surfaces, to decipher the palimpsests that characterize his approach,
and, perhaps above all, to absorb their visceral impact.
Ksiazek's formative decade the 1970s - has largely been ignored
by critics, perhaps because he left all of his work from this period
behind when he escaped from Poland, via Prague, to New York City
in 1982. This decade profoundly affected Ksiazek's identity as a
painter, the formation of his artistic vocabulary, and his understanding
of the artist's role in society. During this time, Ksiazek trained
as a painter at the rigorous, if traditional, Warsaw Academy of
Fine Art and began what had all the hallmarks of a promising career
in Eastern Europe: exhibiting his quasi-abstract paintings in Poland's
few state-run galleries; receiving grants from the Ministry of Culture
to sustain him and his artistic activity; actively engaging in various
levels of resistance against the inequities of everyday life under
a communist totalitarian regime; and witnessing the gradual then
sudden, brutal crackdown on all political opposition inside Poland,
symbolized in the west by the Solidarity movement. After extricating
him self from Poland at great personal risk and landing in an utterly
foreign country, society, and culture at the age of 31, his world-view
was upended. He had enacted one-of the ultimate gestures of political
resistance in choosing exile. To this day, though, his ties to home,
tongue, and family remain deeply internalized and cherished.
Ksiazek's passionate commitment to resistance, to articulating
opposition to unjust, inhumane social and political systems, has
always motivated his painting project. He stated to an interviewer
in 2000 that "an artist who is part of [any] society needs
to maintain a certain distance, to be outside of a sanctioned communal
involvement, to be able to take a position independent of organized
communal activity, to address political urgencies and omissions
through [a] particular artistic language" The artist's social
role, in other words, is to serve as a critic of power structures
and the dominant ideology.
Based In New York City initially, and over the course of the decade
of the 1980s, Ksiazek had to reinvent himself as an individual and
as an artist, at least in terms of everyday life. Without financial
support from a system of state sponsorship of the arts, be had to
figure out how to survive, literally and figuratively in a capitalist
society as a politically disenfranchised person without refugee
status or a green card, initially. (His experiences have made him
a critic of American imperialism, both abroad and at home, in terms
of the inherent injustices of the capitalist system that produce
corruption, poverty, and class-based power imbalances.) Unlike many
other immigrants, Ksiazek never entertained the possibility of eschewing
his metier of painting for a steady job, of an alternative, more
stable income source, or of full assimilation into this new world.
His displacement to such a radically different context proved to
be an exciting challenge that allowed his art to advance and mature
in ways he could not have imagined while living in Poland.
Despite the tremendous changes and turbulence in Ksiazek's adult
life since the 1970s (from political dissidence, to exile, to a
bitter divorce, to a protracted struggle to protect his relationship
with his daughter and the dignity of his fatherhood), his painting
practice has been the one, enduring constant in his life. Similarly,
the leitmotif of the palimpsest has persisted in his work as a formal
vehicle. Virtually every critic who has written about Ksiazek's
paintings notes the partially effaced yet persistent layers of imagery
and mark-making, the obscure yet present traces of thought that
coexist across the vast surfaces of his paintings. Consistently
noted by these critics are Ksiazek's multiple levels of imagery
(architecture, cartography, landscape, body/skin), of allusion (excavation/archeology,
topography, detachment/alienation, injury/ torture) and of meaning
(social space, memory of place, injustice/abuse, individual freedoms/survival).
Ksiazek's newest paintings build on and refine his muItivalent
painting project. They are decisively pared down in their formal
logic, compared with the bodies of work from the 1990s. They are
chromatically more unified and perhaps a bit more metaphorical in
their color symbolism - they continue to interrogate the zone between
abstraction and representation and will no doubt invite refined
interpretations of Ksiazek 's oeuvre.
With these new paintings, one can see the artist honing in on that
one, burning question that troubles and motivates him: how to protect
and foster individual human rights and dignity in the face of chronic
abuse and injustice. Certainly the prototypical case for Ksiazek
is a very personal one; what he views as the violation of the human
rights of his young daughter, Veronika, according to the United
Nations 1990 Convention on the Rights of the Child. David Pagel,
however, muses in this catalogue's essay that Ksiazek's melancholy
but hopeful, defiant paintings deal with the universal, modern question
of survival in the "tragic aftermath of events" and the
"unfathomable suffering that humanity continues to visit upon
itself' as a result of wars and genocide. One of the measures of
Ksiazek's success as a painter of lasting significance is the ability
to meld in eloquent visual terms his experiences of personal tragedy
with his clearly articulated political and philosophical views.
Wlodzimierz Ksiazek has come a very long way as an artist and an
individual over the course of his career. Yet, in many important
respects, he has remained the same all along, passionately committed
to strategies of resistance and to the primacy of painting as a
means of expressing this resistance. Whether in terms of communist
totalitarianism, imperialism, the American capitalist and legal
systems, or the newer post-national, terrorist networks, Ksiazek
sees himself as fighting moral/individual and political/systemic
injustices. The complexity of Ksiazek's painting practice and of
viewers' levels of engagement with it will spark an increasingly
rich discourse. Together, this practice and its discourse reaffirm
the need for painting; especially abstract painting, in this digital
age.
Monographic Publication: Wlodzimierz Ksiazek. Kouros Gallery,
New York, NY, September 12-October 12, 2002. Essay by David Pagel,
Introduction by Amy Ingrid Schlegel, Preface by Jason Andrew. Published
by Kouros Gallery, New York, NY |