Symbiosis of Opposites

About

Please, be advised that due to the COVID-19 situation, the exhibition has been postponed and will not take place as originally planned. New dates of the exhibition will be advised in due time.

- Just don’t go too fast – he said to me […], explaining: - You will never take the same step again.  
And when taking a walk, he always stopped a dozen or so steps after leaving home and he made me look around, asking:
- What do you see? What is there around you? Take a good look around.
So I looked around and told him what I saw, buildings, trees, fences, people. Pigeons on the roof, clouds in the sky, but he never nodded in acknowledgment, just kept on asking:
- And what else?
[…]
- You see – he said, when we finally moved away from that place – what you can see nobody else sees. Even though they could see much more. [1]

What does Mariusz Kruk see? What does he want us to see? What does he want to draw our attention to? Where is he taking us? Answers to these questions, simple as they may seem, could be found looking through the artist’s body of work, through his plastic works and short poetic forms. (However, let’s focus on the plastic works as they are enough to sketch his quest path and creative considerations.) Camouflaged in his works, mimesis becomes complementary exemplification of the everyday and the world perception method as used by the artist. The story of micro-events contained in his works, of seeing and representing often unnoticed phenomena which emerge in front of us among so many issues orbiting around us is the semantic essence. With watchmaking precision, Kruk tries to single out from (his) world all those moments in-between which so perfectly fill our and his lives and note those moments down in the objects he creates. Thus, he draws our attention to the transposition of events, to fractions of moments which in the monotony of life are often overlooked. And Kruk stops by them, he points his finger at them, so that we for sure do not ignore them any more. He frequently uses the example of a nail and a hammer, and the task they are associated with. In his history, we concentrate too often on the mechanism of movement and the effects of it, and we tend to overlook all that is before, after it and what happens in the meantime. It may seem that he dresses his observations in quite common materials, juxtaposing random objects, structure, forms. However, when staying around these works for a while, we start to feel harmony, logic, corelations of the juxtapositions and the symbolics while the objects themselves become almost neoclassical forms. This unconventional way of recording events from the reality becomes a coherent narrative. As far as materials are concerned from which paintings, collages and assamblages are made – they are mostly created out of unnecessary objects, old and discarded, recycled and upcycled garbage. In other words, reminiscences of current sociological, social considerations. And the poetics of Mariusz Kruk is close to a philosophy, misticism, story of the world but not in his individual mode, not in a list of problems, but rather in a holistic narrative. There may be many paths of interpretation, the artist himself never clearly decodes his works leaving this field open. As a piece of art evolved through the observer and art, as Paul Klee put it, […] does not reproduce the visible rather it makes visible.[2]

       Magdalena Kleszyńska

[1] Wiesław Myśliwski, Widnokrąg, Wydawnictwo Znak, Kraków 2007, p. 274-275
[2] Manfred Lurker, Przesłanie symboli w mitach, kulturach i religiach, Wydawnictwo Aletheia, Warsaw 2011, str. 114