Bogumił Książek | Loty

About

They say it all happened in 1869 during Whitsun in the village of Odporyszów. The villagers gathered at the church after Vespers and craned their heads high into the air. They stood, waiting, looking, some at each other rather than in the direction of the church tower, where a tiny figure would appear after a while. People spoke different things about him. Some called him the ‘peasant Icarus,’ others the ‘winged sculptor,’ while he went by the name of Jan Wnęk. He was a carpenter by profession, a young village prodigy, gifted with an extraordinary talent that did not go unnoticed. He fashioned lime wood statues of saints with sad and thoughtful faces. They could hardly have been any different, given that in his youth, Wnęk had witnessed not only the suffering of peasants but also of lords, sawn, quartered and ripped to shreds by the followers of Jakub Szela. Wnęk himself was self-taught. Once he had travelled beyond the boundaries of Odporyszów and had seen Wit Stwosz’s intricate sculptures in St. Mary’s Church in Krakow. Observing the world, he learned. When he was not working, he loved watching birds flying during the day and bats at night. He would follow them with his eyes as they cut through the sky with their delicate wings and drifted borne on air currents. It is difficult to say when Wnęk developed the yearning to fly. What is known is that at some point, he began constructing wings in his workshop. He called them ‘flights’. They were large and light, perhaps even similar to the ones that, thousands of years before, Daedalus had built for himself and his son to escape from Crete. Wnęk, however, did not seek to escape. Chances are that all he wanted was a surrogate for freedom, a desire to see the world from a different perspective. He made his first flight in 1865. Early one morning, as the harvest was beginning, he climbed to the top of one of the Seven Springs Hills and flew. Those who saw this feat later said that Wnęk’s ‘flights’ had been pulled by horses, and he glided on them like a bird. He continued his aerial escapades in the years to come. Apparently, even the newspapers of the time wrote about Wnęk’s feats, and people whispered that he did unbelievable things. It comes as no surprise that a few years later, during Whitsun, a colourful crowd gathered in front of the Odporyszów church, famous for its miracles. This was because it housed a miraculous image of the Virgin Mary, to whom Wnęk had entrusted his flight. It is not known whether, at that one moment, the Blessed Virgin was taken aback by Wnęk’s feat or whether she was preoccupied with other matters, but the man plummeted to the ground 1,350 metres from the church tower. Both the ‘flights’ he had constructed, and his bones broke and shattered. Jan Wnęk died a few days later and was buried by the same priest who had taken him to Kraków and allowed him to fly from the church tower. People, as people do, reportedly said that Wnęk was possessed by the devil, which is why the wings he had built were not preserved. Because, like any infernal tool, they had to be burned. They vanished into thin air, and nothing was left of them. They were only preserved in the stories of the locals, who kept them alive in their memory. The same goes for Wnęk, except that his bones were lost in the Odporyszów soil for many years. Rumour has it that a forgotten grave was found in the local graveyard a few years ago. The interred skeleton exhibits injuries as if the body that encased it had fallen from high up. People claim that splinters were reportedly found in the bones...
That is all, and history tells us only a little more about Jan Wnęk. The Ethnographic Museum in Kraków possesses a model made in 1956 depicting a rag doll that floats on wings. It is supposedly how Wnęk’s ‘flights’ were remembered by those who saw him fly. One day, this story was unearthed by Bogumił Książek. Did he also once want to fly? As a young boy, did he also build machines that would allow him to soar? I do not know the answers to these questions. What I do know is that at some point, Bogumił began to paint pictures on canvas as delicate as if they were about to fly high into the sky. He applied pieces of wood to them. He would bend them, break them, and arrange them in such a way as to fit them onto the paint-covered canvas best. Sometimes he would encase them in something akin to a wooden frame, a rack of sorts, or a skeleton perhaps? This wooden element made his paintings resemble wings. The dynamics of his paintings, built up by successive wooden slats, boards, sticks, supports, hoops and rods, form into a story inspired by the figure of Jan Wnęk. The lightness of the canvas used by Książek, falling, waving, drifting on the looms hidden underneath, expresses not only the desire to soar into the sky but also the fascination with falling... Towards the ground, even closer to the matter...

/Marta Kudelska/

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Bogumił Książek - born in 1974. He studied philosophy at the Jagiellonian University and painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow. He defended his diploma in 2000 in Sławomir Karpowicz's studio. After graduation, he went to Tuscany for seven years. There he met Silvio Loffredo and Mario Luzi. He lived and worked in Florence and Tizzano until 2009. He is a lecturer at the Painting Department of the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow, where he has been running an interdisciplinary studio since 2019.