Cyprian Kościelniak „Groundhog Day”

Curator: Piotr Rypson
Dec 8, 2023 – Jan 26, 2024

“We have no influence on the time in which we are born, but we can influence how we live through it.” These are the words of Andrzej Poczobut, a Polish journalist and political prisoner in Belarus. We didn’t want these words to become so urgently relevant. And yet. The time we live in is a time of inverted concepts and false meanings. Our words were taken away and given the opposite meaning, the truth was called a lie, and falsehood and hypocrisy became the norm.

On October 15, we made a great choice.  We have achieved what seemed impossible, we have freed ourselves from the SLAVERY OF POWERLESSNESS. We have broken the cursed cycle of hopelessness. This is almost what Baron Münchhausen did when he pulled himself and his horse out of the swamp by his own hair.

There will be time for poetry, however, because first it’s time for cleaning. By writing these words, I want to define the nature of this exhibition.I have been working on it since 2018.  It is not an art exhibition, nor is it art.  My works are a document of seven years of being pissed off.  Reactions and reflections thrown out onto paper and canvas.  A type of visual activism. When I officially found out that I was inferior kind and a traitorous mug, I was unable to ignore this humiliation. The time of Covid and isolation deepened this condition and gave it an almost physical shape. Suddenly, we saw with great force how much we were losing every day. Then we only counted the successive bottoms of the swamp that were sinking under us.So this is not the time to paint still lifes and landscapes. I would never forgive myself such escapism.  This catalog is a parallel presentation to the exhibition. These are sketches and pencil versions of the works.  I wanted the temporary form of the catalog to show the process of recent years. As I write these words, I do not know the final shape of the exhibition yet. The truth is, I’m still working on it.
Cyprian Kościelniak
November 2023

Piotr Rypson
PO’d or about insightfulness
A few comments about the art of creation by Cyprian Kościelniak

Art exhibitions are only its festive circumstances, especially in case of an artist who is exhibited practically non-stop – in visual columns in the press, on magazine covers… But an exhibition gives a chance to stop the flow of things, look at some selection from the entire oeuvre, and make a few observations about this art.

A special type of focus, which characterizes Cyprian Kościelniak is, I think, necessary for his profession of commentator of reality, and results in an increased state of insightfulness. This has its consequences and ramifications – and below are a few comments about them.  They must be given quickly, because with the tempo imposed by the artist, one should avoid wordiness.

The world is spinning faster and faster, and with it thoughts and means of expression which organize them, words, images, media, and interfaces. Kościelniak is a master of this rush because, among other things, he has the ability to freeze the frame, and even move it back to reveal the hidden cause of movement and resulting events.  To illustrate this I will use his masterful drawing 9/11: a view of the two WTC towers in New York, observed “from the inside” through the eye holes in the kidnapper’s balaclava. We have the perpetrator’s point of view. Therefore, not knowing what we have “experienced,” that is, natural sympathy for the victims, but “the other,” what we do not see, or perhaps we prefer not to see.

Insightfulness.  It requires effort to select a “blank spot,” which causes the viewers to become “speechless” at the sight of something.  So, in fact, they repressed it from their imagination and were unable or unwilling to name it. However, when we repress something, it leaves a trace in the brain, let’s call it an imprint. The artist’s skill lies in his ability to find and affect this place.

There is a concept of “allusive referential” introduced by Dick Higgins, another outstanding artist and art theorist.  He wrote about it as follows:  “What I mean here is simply a change from the subconsciously expected to the unexpected, not for the purpose of introducing novelty, but to refer to some significant additional element that would otherwise remain uninduced.”  To illustrate this graphically – to hit a billiard ball lying on the table in a hard-to-reach place, you need to hit it not directly, but by directing the player’s white ball in a different direction until it bounces off one or two edges and moves the one, which is inaccessible. It requires skill, craftsmanship and experience.

Cyprian Kościelniak says about this effect that, according to his simple theory, “drawing works only up to half the distance from the eye. The rest comes from the recipient.”  The artist counts on the audience-participants and wants to stir their imagination. However, he does not add how much attention and visual acuity is needed to create an epiphany using this simple theory.

Because that’s what his drawings and paintings are like.  They dazzle.  In this publication accompanying the exhibition in his hometown of Kalisz, there is no space to write about the ferocity of the style, its punk-patterned and expressionist origins and artistic affinities (which the artist himself often declares). Nor about the topics discussed – oppression of women, Jedwabne, hunting people in the forest, Muslims, Israel and Poland, pedophiles in the church, violence, Bucza, and even the Statute of Kalisz. Nor about painting, which he has been practicing for some time, about the reasons and the scale of the topics. The selection of works itself was a challenge, because one could wish for much more space to show them. Let me just add a few words addressed directly to the visitors of the exhibition.

The insightfulness in the title is not only about tension, craftsmanship and nerve.  It is also the eponymous PO’d.  A man who wakes up and suddenly gets up in bed, looks at the world with concern, excitement, but also with anger. At this world and at his home country, which has deteriorated and been spoiled to such an extent in recent years, and at his hometown, from which he has never detached himself. Look at this anger, please – and take it personally.

Cyprian Kościelniak. Born in Kalisz in 1948.
Graduated from Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń – Faculty of Fine Arts, the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk and the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw; diploma at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw in 1974 in the studio of prof. Henryk Tomaszewski (poster design).
Professionally active since 1973 as a press graphic designer, book illustrator, poster designer, film credits designer, television set designer, documentarian and photographer of the visual reality of the Polish People’s Republic.
He has lived in the Netherlands since 1987. He works as a press illustrator. He cooperates with Dutch, German, and American newspapers.

dr Piotr Rypson
Curator of exhibitions, historian of literature and culture.  Chairman of the national committee of ICOM POLAND – International Council of Museums. He specializes in avant-garde art, research on the borderlands of literature and art in the eras of data and the present, and visual records of the Holocaust. Author of many exhibitions, including Art Gallery of 20th and 21st Century and Shouting: Poland! Independent – 1918 (both in the National Museum in Warsaw, 2013, 2018) and many others. Author of several books and nearly 300 publications. Curator of the ongoing exhibition of the underground archive of the Warsaw Ghetto (Ringelblum Archive) at the Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism in Munich.

Exhibition duration: Dec 8, 2023 – Jan 26, 2024
Exhibition opening: Friday, Dec 8, 2023, at 7 pm

Organizer:
The Jan Tarasin Art. Gallery in Kalisz
Culture Institution of Kalisz

Exhibition partner:
Faculty of Pedagogy and Fine Arts in Kalisz, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań

Gallery partners:
Ergo Hestia, Polifarb Kalisz S.A., M&P Alkohole i wina świata

Media patronage:
NN6T, SZUM, wkaliszu.pl, Calisia.pl, Radio Centrum, Ziemia Kaliska