Art stories7 - The exhibition represents a selection of paintings from Polish Artists.

NEW REALITIES a celebration of subversion JAN JANCZAK ZBIGNIEW BLUKACZ PAVEL SLOTA PATRICIA AYMARA BAILER

art stories7 The exhibition represents a selection of paintings from Polish Artists. The art scene in Poland has strongly developped in recent years, trying to explore, what is typically polish, however, at the same time, beeing totally modern. In the past, Poland itself had constantly to adopt to new realities. All of a sudden, everything became different to that before, twisted, moved or even nonexistant. Not beeing in a position to rely on anything, artists are stretching into all directions, exaggerating, trespassing limits, thereby, willingly or not, creating ironic or tragicomic momentums. Matters are radically exerted up to breaking-point thereby leaving no room for whatever system.

Wth this longer-term commitment in the form of a changing selection of art works on the 8th and 9th floor of the corporate center in Pratteln, Clariant wishes to stimulate a positive discourse onmodern art.

Introduction to the group exhibition The women in the paintings on canvas or cardboard created by Jan Janczak using mixed media are shown as figures seen from the front. Although donning striking headdresses and unusual apparel, the extravagant figures seem not so much to be seeking, attention, begging for it, but rather to be longingly awaiting something. This magic that cannot be pinpointed with precision and that derives from the artistic design exhibits peculiarities that point to symbolist and surrealist modes of expression [Bodo Brinkmann, http://www.janjanczak.ch/worte.html, 30.10.2014]. Born in 1938 in Sroda, Poland, and living in Switzerland since 1980, artist Jan Janczak in this regard also exhibits ties to Józef Mehoffer (1869-1946), whose hand was known to produce portraits that spare the model the deciphering of their soul and render them unreadable. Mehoffer was one of Zygmunt Radnicki‘s (1894-1969) teachers, who in turn taught Janczak [on biographical connections see Brinkmann, http://www.janjanczak.ch/worte.html, 30.10.2014]. On this side of this „Krakow Line“, we may furthermore note a different Polish avant-garde movement of the postwar period in the Polish constructivism that emerged in the city of Lodz, a path that was decisively influenced by Katarzyna Kobro and Wladyslaw Strzeminski – both students of Russian constructivist Kasimir Malewitsch – [Brinkmann, http://www.janjanczak. ch/worte.html, 30.10.2014]. Janczak, who experienced the Polish occupation by Russian troops in the 1950s, declared early on that his work was a „protest against the barbaric“ [according to Brinkmann, http://www.janjanczak.ch/worte.html, 30.10.2014].

Janczak‘s paintings were thus at all times interpretable as signs seeking to point to the sensitivities of a country and its people: „Thus, long before the Solidarnosc movement [circa 1980], Jan Janczak had already made his mark, his mark in the sense that he displayed the possibilities of life as he felt them within himself. He dreamed the desires of his society and expressed them in his paintings“ comments Tony Vinzens, thereby also underscoring the fact that the paintings advocate „preserving humanity“ [Tony Vinzens, http://www.janjanczak.ch/worte.html, 30.10.2014] and seek to save the pristine soul of the humane. This of course is to

imply that, in the possibility of pointing to the pristine world, to the remote abstraction of a human individual in a painting, an analogy to the spiritual and physical freedom of humanity is justified in the first place. Thus, the trajectory of Jan Janczak‘s life and works is closely linked to the more recent history of Polish art. Thus, in their figurative content, his works significantly differ from all the painters assembled in this exhibition. And yet, in his works, Janczaks nonetheless displays something that is true of all the pictorial discoveries of the younger polish generation of artists and Patricia Aymara Bailers pictorial inventions on display here: they attest to art‘s powers of reference, the displacement of the representational and the tangible, the enchantment, indeed the mystification of this life, and not least to the exploration of pictorial media and potential. Beyond that, Pavel Slota and Zbigniew Blukacz afford the observer disconcerting views of the modern city. The paintings transform the fixed pattern of urban space into fluid, blurring forms that, in the case of “Rainy Street”, even play upon the colour of rust and freeze the already ephemeral within of its temporal order. In the pictures of Patricia Aymara Bailer, who wear so lyrically memorable names such as „Sinnesflut“ (“sensory flooding”), „Herzkommunikation“ (“heart communication”), or „Aus der Asche steige auf und erneure dich” (“Out of the ashes to climb and revolve yourself“) appear enigmatic fantasies, in which in addition to oil and wax unusual materials such as paper, ash, chalk, condense. The materials refer not only to nature in its small-scale, sometimes powdered form, they also bring a temporal component to the game, which suggests that the cloudy forms are located at the same time in dissolving and emerging. The viewer may recognize anthropomorphic creatures here and there, but a visual fixation will not withstand. Form seem to withdraw into a spiritual matter in order to re-embody from there the next moment: „My dilemma is that I‘m trying to represent something that is not actually represented in the material. It is a constant struggle to make the intangible tangible, to break the APPARENT and transform in BEING „ [Patricia Aymara Bailer, http: pyro-logos.weebly.com, 12.11.2014].

Maximilian Geiger

Jan Janczak No title Mixed media on carton, 2013 79 x 49cm

In this untitled portrait, Jan Janczak shows an anonymous woman. She appears seen from the front, sat down opposite us. Although the portrait is to be considered a visualization of a human being, the representation, including the woman figure, appears absent, strangely spirited away. The artist depicts her in front of a red background, on which little green rectangles are evenly distributed. The figure dons a costly, albeit surreal appearing headdress along with a striking scarf around her neck. The figure‘s otherworldliness is intimately linked to her pictorial status. For she is more ornament, more a valuable surface than a living being of flesh and blood. Yet the result of this is that the woman figure attains a whole new significance on account of the painting. On account of the painting she is able to to give expression to her dignity.

Jan Janczak No title Mixed media on canvas, 2013 42 x 40cm

The relatively small format of this portrait of a woman does not seem to initially grab the attention of the observer. It is in the figure itself, which appears en face , that the significant dimension conveyed by the painting resides all the same. In the background, human figures are discernible, whose contours are overlapped by an ephemeral red that wrenches them away from tangibility along with the temporal order. These figures do not define any space, however, but stride and encounter one another in the realm of the undefined. One could describe the background as an immersion, whereas the woman figure appears to emerge in the foreground, her presence a surprise. What Janczak wishes to hint at here – and, in doing so, he also opens the space up to one of art‘s social, humane dimensions – is the relationship of the individual to society [cf. Brinkmann http://www.janjanczak.ch/worte.html, 31.10.2014].

Jan Janczak No title Mixed media on canvas, 2013 33 x 30cm

The painting shows the bust of a woman in front of a dark blue background. Her chest and shoulders fill out the bottom third of the picture. The slender face is covered by a large hat, the brim of which more or less marks the middle of the painting. Although the woman‘s eyes should actually be covered by the light blue hat, they appear on its brim. What the spherical colours and the woman figure that defies the proportions of the human body already convey culminates in the unexpected presence of the eyes: inherent in the representation is a surrealistic reality beyond the laws of space and fact. The painting seeks to express the depths of the imagination, to lend „wings“ to the human soul [Tony Vinzens, http://www.janjanczak. ch/worte.html, 31.10.2014].

Zbigniew Blukacz Rainy street Oil on canvas, 2013 170 x 235cm

Zbigniew Blukacz‘s large-format work “Rainy Street� shows a view into a city. More accurately, it shows a view into a flowing urban space that once was composed of buildings, advertisement boards, concrete, streets, and so forth. The vantage point Blukacz affords the observer is similar to the one a pedestrian on the pavement assumes, if he turns to face the street. We discern this in the bottom right of the painting, where the pedestrian walkway is still hinted at. Our attention is moreover drawn to the rust-coloured patina that forcefully makes itself felt on the bottom and especially on the top edge of the painting. It lends the work the status of an eye, with which one bring something into focus but that in the next moment becomes clouded and fuzzy. Yet at the same time it spirits the urban landscape away into another time.

Pavel Slota Spaces disclosed XVII Oil on canvas, 2014 100 x 160cm

A powerful stream of colour and light dominates Pavel Slota‘s painting. A dynamic path of light seems to constantly be moving in and out of the picture. A perpetual energy permeates this painting in oils on canvas, which seems to seek to convey an undefinable experience in the 21st-century city. Is it that Slota is portraying the view from a railway, that accelerated feeling imparted by a carousel ride, or is it instead the impression of vehicles rushing by? This quality of being undefined is further articulated by the fact that the picture does not represent the city as an image construed in perspective that would absorb the observer into itself. Far more, the representation does not make it all that simple for the observer to choose a vantage point, or more accurately, to find out how he relates to the painting.

Patricia Aymara Bailer Sinnesflut Oil, ash, wax, graphite on canvas, 2002 100 x 120cm

We see different substances swinging in varying densities made of oil, ash and wax. The substances concentrate and separate from one another again, kindling associations of anthropomorphic, architectural bodies and countenances. Spatial dimensions appear to rear up on their hind legs, tear at entanglements, meld into each other as towers and waves; it is as if the observer were being sucked into the undefined inside world of the pictorial space. The large wave-like gesture in the left half of the painting, is left standing as if frozen and forms a hollow that finds no resonance in the rest of the flow of the painting. This vacuum hints at a „space of unconsciousness“ that needs to be overcome whenever the old disintegrates and the new has not yet been created. Patricia Aymara Bailer uses the substance of oil to symbolize a bearer of light and warmth, the wax as their solidification, and ash to symbolize the force of transformation having passed through death.

Patricia Aymara Bailer Herzkommunikation I Oil, smoke, wax on paper, 2012 50 x 50cm

This painting is defined by two, partially connected, amorphous figures that lie floating on a dark surface drawn in smoke. Smoke, its countless ever-changing shape formations that emerge from the depths of incomprehensible origins to discharge into unfathomable spaces and dissipate, creates a new dimension of spatiality. Its fine, transparent layers give rise to a sensual impression of depth. A heart shape is seen between the two figures, expressing the multi-layered possibilities of communication and also the tender fragility of the moment.

Patricia Aymara Bailer Herzkommunikation II Oil, smoke, wax on paper, 2012 50 x 50cm

Two figures in warm, amber-coloured hues on smoke. On pure linseed oil, molten wax is set with a living, immanently glowing patina. The figures appear to be suspended beyond space and time, are in contact with one another in an ether-world made visible through soot. Underlying all this is P. A. Bailer‘s approach of incorporating transformation and the act of creating a newly-born visibility in the world of matter, the primordial feminine materiality. In doing so, a surprising breakthrough of light results - through the oil, which, held up to a window, lets the incoming light shine through: sensual visual perception awakening new effects of depth. The qualities this process is capable of tapping into for the eye and the moved sense of evenly-weighted experience is a new discovery. The artistic use of wax, oil, light and smoke thus becomes the starting point for a transformation process in painting.

Patricia Aymara Bailer Embracing life Oil, smoke, Citric Acid, chalk on paper, 2013 50 x 70cm

„There is no great artist who does not possess a boundless love of life.“ Henry Bordeaux This quotation resounds in the picture thanks to its title. On a sienna-coloured trace, a discolouration created by heating citric acid, lies a female body drawn in dynamic strokes. The body embraces the smoky and not truly tangible substance that symbolizes the invisible force of life. This force, when seized upon by human beings, enables a person to be the creator of their life. Renewal requires the transformation of materiality, and Patricia Aymara Bailer also brings it about in her quest for new substances, by painting with citric acid and smoke, for instance. Underlying all this is her approach of incorporating transformation and the act of creating a newly-born visibility in the world of matter, the primordial feminine materiality. She has explored this new and so far unique artistic field that enables air and fire to become visible, thus forging the solid (including crystalline and metastable, amorphous states) liquid and gaseous states of matter into an alchemy of art.

Patricia Aymara Bailer You are not the pain Oil, ash, smoke, wax, shellac, pigment, graphite on paper, 2010 50 x 50cm

The part of the picture that has been burned through and is framed in earthy red takes a central position, like a gaping wound that draws the observer‘s attention to itself. The scattering of molten shellac extends in both directions, giving the impression of an echo of the wound. The female body drawn on a base of oil behind it is grappling for this so very central breakthrough. The underlying smoke (Amazon candea resin) lifts the proceedings into an inner reality. The artist‘s works in these substances are invariably connected with symbolism for her. Above all, the yearning to dissolve the paper‘s two-dimensionality finds expression here. Patricia Aymara Bailer achieves this through the transparency of oil, by burning through a medium, but also through the act of capturing this fleeting substance called air, an element of space and non-space. She consciously uses the three states of matter (solid, liquid, an gaseous), by melting, freezing, evaporating, condensing and sooting the respective substances she uses.

Impressum NEW REALITIES - a celebration of subversion An exhibition from Basel Art Center in cooperation with Leonhard Ruethmueller Gallery / Basel, Gallery Stalowa / Warszawa, Gallery Strefa A / Krakow Tel. +41 61 222 22 85 4058 Basel, www.baselartcenter.ch

Curator

Matthias R端thm端ller

Assistenz Laura Geissel

Text

Maximilian Geiger Patricia Aymara Bailer

Photos

Basel Art Center

Layout and Design Lichtblick Design www.licht-blick-design.de

Art shipping

Monro GmbH fine logistics 4058 Basel, www.monro.ch

Translations

CLS Communication AG 4051 Basel, www.cls-communication.com