shangyuan

上苑艺术馆2012年驻馆艺术家-Urszula威尔克（波兰）新作品展

2014–获2013最佳奖， [波兰艺术家和设计师] 协会，弗罗茨瓦夫波兰

Wilk（波兰）-蓝色畅想1-布面丙烯-160x150cm-2012(上苑艺术馆收藏）

2014 – The Best of 2013 Award, ZPAP [Association of Polish Artists and Designers], Wrocław Region

2013 – Nature’s Incredible Extravagance in Using Blue, The City Museum, Wrocław

2017 – BRATISLAVA PRO WRATISLAVIA, WRATISLAVIA PRO BRATISLAVA, Wrocław; Bratislava, Slovakia

2016 – Taiwan World Watercolor Competition and Exhibition, Zhong Zheng Art Gallery, Kei-Shenk Memorial Hall, Taipei, Taiwan

2006 – 60th Anniversary of the Academy of Fine Arts in Wrocław, The National Museum, Wrocław

1996 – Spiral 1, exhibition of works by Lower Silesian artists, Gerard Blum Kwiatkowski Foundation, Świeradów Zdrój

1992 – Form & Colour, i.e. Everything’s For Sale, Galerie Bluefabrik, Dresden, Germany

Wilk（波兰）-波兰人在中国9-水墨-53x75cm-2012（上苑艺术馆收藏）

and again
stillness ensues,
and the mystery
of that sheer
clarity, is it water indeed,
or air, or light

Only when I started my work I realized how difficult it is to write about Urszula Wilk’s artistic output. Its abstract character, formal simplicity and faithfulness to one’s own gesture seemingly bring a wide range of possible free interpretations and metaphorizations. On the other hand, the perspective of traditions from the Far East, the mysticism of the West, informalism or neodesign aesthetics irresistibly impose their presence. Some of her works can also be included in the category of landscape architecture, which after all is more and more situational, ephemeral and symbolic. And on the other hand: how to capture the mark of the individualism in her works, which by principle escape all kinds of definiteness? How to identify subjectivity which endlessly questions itself through universalizing or accidental gesticulation? And all this is intensified even more by the artist’s restrained self-commentaries. Additionally, my anxiousness increased when I read a great essay by Marek Śnieciński devoted to Urszula Wilk2. Therefore, it is quite a big challenge, but what do we have the concept of mission impossible for? And the poetry by Denise Levertov (DL), whose spiritual affinity with the artist from Wrocław is in my opinion almost unheard-of. Her lines will, like a Greek chorus with its refrain, give rhythm to the present argumentation.

Today’s artworld situation made us used to “eventually current” artists, that is the ones who easily fit in the coming trends, coming “right approaches”. Increasingly seldom one can encounter artists such as Urszula Wilk, who remain loyal to their own ideas and intuition. Her starting point takes the form of faith in the elevated character of direct painting gesture. In the power of experiencing this what is before language and what is relevant. I will carry out my reasoning from various points, taking into consideration categories in my opinion crucial for her painting spaces (e.g. visibility, form, cut, contingency, gesture, etc.). By the force of circumstances, it will be a draft only. My aim will not be to “translate” the particular paintings or gestures into a conceptual discourse, but rather to sketch the perspective allowing, in my opinion, to perceive more clearly the complexity of situation in which the artist finds her presence. And also to sketch the consequences put forward by her works.

The majority of mystical attitudes is based on the idea of integrity. Such concepts are found both in Orphic initiations of demonic depth of our soul and in Platonic desubjectification towards immortality, and probably also in Gorgias’s duality of everything (sic!). More contemporarily, in turn, in Romanticism instigating the experience of abyss and immensity. And also genius. The echo of this approach is also found in avant-garde, in its hope that the new form will open new and more complete meanings and feelings. Urszula Wilk fits in these various and complex traditions. She initiates certain games and perhaps – even less discoursively – only concatenations, clashes of occurrences, emptiness and unlimited freedom of the painting gesture. The concatenations of fullness and emptiness, of universal and accidental. Mutually inseparable and complementary, like Yin and Yang, like Good and Evil.

Of course, the analogy to painting techniques of Taoism and Buddhism imposes its presence here. Some records concerning peculiar Chinese Ink-Wang mysteries of spilling black ink at the white canvas date back as early as to the 7th century AD. Canvasses that juxtapose the emptiness with form like in the later ukiyo-e images. After all, existence and non-existence give birth one to the other (Laozi3). It manifests metaphysics that is completely distinct from our own, and distinct imagination, because the concrete is created there through distorting and damaging the unity. Therefore, the painting gesture, by breaching the potential fullness of the emptiness, paradoxically makes it more real but only as… a delusion. Tao wisdom consists in a simple, spontaneous interaction between natural cycles. In not acting (wu-wei), which does not denote passiveness but overcoming the calamitous subject/object dualism. It organically situates us with respect to the unity rather than the concrete (form). The purpose of wu-wei is peace, which results from the compliance with the rhythms of natural energy flows, instead of Platonic motionless possession of truth as the only and ultimate form. Inspirations with the Far East are clearly visible in Wilk’s art, where every other gesture organically “orders” the accidental occurrence of the previous one. Of course, similar intuitions may be found also in Stoic logos or Heraclitus teaching about the sense which multiplies itself. And that the impenetrable is penetrated by the impenetrable4. Equally interesting parallels may be created with respect to the Kabbalah tradition. Especially the concept of hebel (futile vanity) of Kohelet harmonizes with the Buddhist sunjata.

The 20th century made us realize that we lost the common perspective of seeing, we lost the common visibility. We replaced it with endless flickering of various demands, usurpations and marketing. And with scattered images (Benjamin). The artist today faces the alternative – whether to get involved in this game of flickering or whether to go beyond it with excess or ascesis? The artist from Wrocław seems to select even a distinct approach, that is to remain on the edge of visibility. Even more precisely: in moments defined by Didi-Huberman as moving from visuality to visibility. Visuality is direct, oblivious, natural. And visibility constitutes cultural iconographic community. Visuality happens through IS, through inconceivable and cosmic. Visibility, in turn, is created by PRESENCE – it is always interim, mediated, participating. In my opinion, Urszula Wilk’s paintings are located within the borders of this IS, which does not change into the presence but escapes it. And at the same time, it also wants to exist. Even as a trace, suggestion or feeling. Of course, such a general approach imposes questions concerning the unity, the visibility as such. Naturally, the pervasive look is impossible and unimaginable. Extra-human. Particularly in the world ravaged by the so called philosophy of superstitions. Therefore, the attempt to experience the paradoxical “unity” somehow from the other side – from nothingness, anomie, emptiness -– is some kind of a solution. As the negative aspect of emptiness whose synonym in painting is represented by the whiteness of the painting support.

Changes in the contemporary times coerce searching for a new understanding and perception of form. It is a very important task for the contemporary art. The form is not a conclusion any more but a process-like display of irreducible changeability, complexity and plurality. With similar focus we should also bring the importance back to what is unspeakable, potential or impossible to portray. Of course, humans have made similar attempts since the beginning of time. However, we discover anew e.g. Baroque, whose realism rapidly changes from the blackness of nothingness into the blackness of infinity. Similarly like the whiteness of fullness changes into the whiteness of emptiness in Japanese ukiyo-e images. Or impressionism, which makes an attempt to capture and portray the idiom of a particular moment. An accident was considered to be the anchor of what is unitary and exceptional. So was a mistake. Therefore, the 20th century art, and in particular avant-garde, strongly believed in the emancipating and creative power of causing anomalies. The accident was introduced to art among others through the strategies of ephemeralness (impressionism), fragmentariness (collage), ecstasy, experiment or the concept of game.

Urszula Wilk’s art gently resonates with today’s challenges. And what above all makes her painting ritualizations and mysteries up-to-date are the multidimensional clashes between the accident and the adventitiousness. In brief, accidentality means unpredictable freedom and chaos. Adventitiousness, in turn, is customarily attributed to postmodernism. It is a situation when by acting without principles, or rather acting by creating the principles, with every other step we limit our possibilities. The previous gesture somehow suggests, programs, and later even forces the following one. At this point, another category important for interpretation of Wilk’s paintings appears – the clash between “is” and “happens.”Tradition made us face the choice between two metaphysical perspectives: linearity and cyclicity. Currently, more and more often the occurrence of events understood as the unordered sequence of peculiarities imposes its presence (e.g. Deleuze, Badiou). The tangram, a Chinese game changing its own rules, i.e. per analogiam: the way in which the image is created coincides with the image itself, should also be mentioned here.

In Urszula Wilk’s artistic output, the necessity would be represented by the marks of gravity (water stains), the unchangeable natural character of gravitation. Hence, a primitive gesture being the basis of the symbolic dimension of our existence was probably represented by lifting a stone up. Defying the natural inertia. In turn, the accident would be manifested here by unpredictable scraps of strong hits. Their accumulation and multiple layers. And adventitiousness means elusive preferences included in the unawareness of the spontaneous gesture. An attempt to visualize the unawareness was already made by surrealists using the so called automatic writing strategy. It seems that it is directly referred to also by Wilk in her Niewysłane listy (Unsent letters) cycle. Sometimes, she also makes the situation more complicated when, like watercolorists, she “gravitates” with the picture in the course of painting. By changing the position of the painting she alters the directions in which the paint is dripping. The so called dripping changes into stylization, the accident and the necessity that are “ordered” altogether. And it is only the author’s decision that specifies anew where the “bottom” of the painting is, where our “naturalness” is.

She consistently juxtaposes any kind of definiteness (form) with the lack of it. With emptiness which scrutinizes the definiteness. Even a declared materialist Žižek recently has written that every definiteness includes some elements of emptiness which scrutinizes it from the inside5. Here, the additional emptiness may also be complemented by excess, by the density of form. Hence, through overabundance we also lose orientation. They together create breaches and suspensions in the unstoppable palimpsest of forming our visibility.

The artist juxtaposes the world of necessity and accident with hardly visible rhythms, regular repetitions, conscious stimulated densifications, modulating contrast or the multidirectional dripping. On the other hand, perspective and illusion of depth are replaced by multidimensionality. Shortly speaking, she ultimately contrasts this world with aestheticism – the gesture of creating compositions, searching/establishing the harmony. It will sound rather paradoxically in the times of ever omnipresent criticism, but aestheticism can also be an emancipating and creative form. Forgetful of paralyzing mediations, multiplication of layers and loops of our culture, Urszula Wilk directly refers here to intuition. Hence, the intuition is the medium in which (anti) images of mysticism from the East and the West take the shape of aestheticism.

Moreover, it is the aestheticism somehow in the pure form – primitive, archetypical, and not styling. And the cornerstone of the abstraction was not only represented by the modernizing avant-garde but also equally by the pantheistic theosophy. And its cardinal principle of searching for the hidden harmony of everything. A widely discussed distinction between Wolfgang Welsch’s general and derivative aestheticisation was the echo of this approach6. The first concept is the basic principle of the pre-conscious ordering of space and of the whole economy of perception. The German philosopher opposed it with the derivative aestheticisation understood as beautification. Of course, the images described here resonate also with other aesthetics. Quite a significant function is undoubtedly played here by Japanese Wabi-sabi aestheticism, which accepts imperfections of the world of things. And forms. As well as the awareness of their state of alteration and continuous incompleteness.

The concept of form is another issue characteristic of this artistic output. Recently, the vitality of art has been related to the change of formal approach into the so called problematic one. However, it turns out that it can be equally subject to routine and thoughtless. Hence, the growing popularity of clinamen or subversion strategies, which are conscious that schemes and formalizations are inevitable and it is necessary to outsmart them. Playing with the schemes. According to this perspective, what comes with an invigorating force are the (post) formalist aesthetics redefining Heinrich Wölfflin’s (art as a depiction of subjective ways of seeing7) or Roger Fry’s (art as significant deformation8) deliberations that analyze the economy of eye along with moods, emotional states, personalities, etc. which modulate it. The concept of form and regularity recurs. It may also be found in the works by such prominent artists as Anish Kaoor or Tony Cragg. Urszula Wilk seems to fit into this tendency. She does not gamble on a new status and redefining the form itself, but rather more radically – modalities of the existence of the visibility itself. Their relation with amorphy and polymorphy. And also with Welsch’s anaesthetics, which analyses the mechanisms of disappearing visibility. Such interests make us face the impossible: how to paint a static image of unimaginable unity? And the unity perceived as a dynamic process? Lyotard’s strategy of palimpsest, where the following images displace the ultimateness of the previous ones, may be helpful here. This may be also the purpose of relocating paintings during exhibitions and recomposing already completed paintings anew. Or juxtaposing newly-created fragments according to the principle of a patchwork.

Year 2008 is a relevant caesura in the development of the artist’s paintings. Namely, a prominent move from one “completed” painting to the plurality of paintings, their simultaneous character and movability, appears. It also leads to other issues: finiteness and the wholeness of a painting, the status of its decomposed parts. What is the cut creating it? The tear in the curtain of delusions or another curtain? Uncovering the depth or only the layer of illusion, the layer of surface (Deleuze)? These questions are cumulated in the concept of cut as an assemblage, the fundamental principle in modernism. As the change of static unity into a dynamic collage. Here, Wilk’s undisputed roots connecting her with the European avant-garde tradition can be seen. Connecting her also with the search for the form through experiment and the game of accident. And sometimes also through the whim. However, she is distinguished by a postmodern desire to avoid the ultimate form. It may be achieved e.g. through the transparent supports of the newest paintings, which while hanging in space are to create background-less permeation of surfaces. The principle of all-over composition, without a dominant, without the figure and ground opposition fundamental for the West, is also to serve the same purpose. And even when the aforementioned opposition appears it is immersed in ambiguity. Because it is not entirely certain what the backgorund is and what the figure is. Perhaps, the outside blackness defining the shape of bubbling grey stains located in the centre (like in the cycle of works from 2010) is the figure?

Urszula Wilk consistently complements the opposing perspectives. She strives to complementarity. Hence, as mentioned, she complements the assemblage-like cut by decomposing some paintings during exhibitions. The play of fragments is complemented by the game of unities (plural). This game has yet another form at the “micro level”. Increasingly often, it is possible to find lines in her paintings, the synonym of division, differentiation and cutting, which when multiplied changes into a shivering surface (like in Blumetries cycle).

Similar approach refers to the principle of repetition, repetitiveness being the basic principle of our consciousness. Like a rhythm is the basis of the conscious visibility. Our modern artistic tradition was shaped by striving to exceptionality and originality of style. However, the recent century is rather the age of repetitions. Of various kinds, also the problematic ones. We remember that at some point Benjamin contradicted the traditional aura of art with its reproducibility. Urszula Wilk seems to change this opposition into a more contemporary strategy of redundancy – intensifying by reiteration and reconfiguration of the same stimulus or impression. She reiterates specific gestures using her brush, multiplying its traces into regular arrangements of semi/ornaments. Reiterating them with a different color and different dilutions.

The aforementioned transition from one painting to a multiplied, cut, displaced image, but also to a resized one, coincides with the transition to a more intensive work where Wilk applies water painting techniques. Semitransparent washes and glazes replaced the non-transparent impasto of paint. And the change of the support from canvas to paper increased the paintings’ organic finesse. The outcome was transparency of all gestures, layers and their order. Nothing can be hidden or corrected here. But everything can be only the basis, the “subtext” in another unity, another layer of visibility. Another harmonization or more complex interdependence.

The simplicity and abstract character of forms is accompanied by radical color asceticism. Usually, paintings play out in monochromes between (not) ultimate white and (not) ultimate black. Sometimes, a blue color – synonymous with sky and spirituality – is added, as well as the color of blood and earth. Sometimes, different shades of grey interlace. And a nameless color (Newton), hence sometimes we feel some anomy of colors, inability to identify them. Perhaps, Laozi’s warning – the abundance of colors blinds the eye9 – resonates here again.

By creating monochromes (for example of blue), the artist makes a dispute with various forms of its existence. Therefore, glazes, washes, impastos, textures, whitening, diffusing hues and their intermittency appear. Subtle contrasts or rather modalities, not familiar for our visibility, can be observed in the paintings. Clean shades of black are sometimes opposed to diffused ones, which reveal shades of grey hidden in them. Hence, their gradations create not the illusion of space, but they rather suggest or promise it. This symbolic morphology of paint clashes with the rhythm and a firm gesture, as well as with the densification of (not) forms – marks. However, above all else, the color clashes with not/color of whiteness, this synonym of emptiness/nothingness/fullness. Moreover, the potential, primitive whiteness featured by the painting support is confronted here with the derivative whiteness created with paint. It is the same but also a different whiteness because it covers and destroys, it is negative, concrete through the act of negation and coverage. Through this process, the whiteness preserves its ambiguity – as an emptiness/fullness, potentiality and happening concreteness.

Therefore, what in this context is the painting gesture itself? The gesture as the game or as the act of disputing? The principle of game was replaced in art by the logic of mimesis, symbolicity, and later by the expression. Also as today’s provocation or subversion. Currently, a radical and dynamic understanding of the game seems to prevail. It is rather the game that dominates the player and in fact it is the game that creates the players. We do not so much play in something or for something as we ourselves are played. Playing the game, that is the performativity itself, becomes a basic economy of being in the world of a global spectacle. The opposite of the game is gesture. It includes a self-realizing singularity. The gesture expresses a mannerism – a learned or natural display of emotions. It expresses the initial, formative approach to oneself, to the world and other people. Already Plotinus claimed that experiencing the process of being born through one’s own mannerism (as ethos) is the only happiness of human. The self-determining gesture was later also the basis of Informel aesthetics. Moreover, it was also in compliance with the spirit of existentialism which was popular at that time. The reappearing organic development concept tells us to respect the perceivable regularity of changes, but also the synchronic elements included in a single gesture. The gesture avoids an unambiguous decision or choice, it leaves the space for both feelings and archetypes. The schematism and rebelliousness. It may create a flickering spontaneity but also a ritual initiation. It allows to avoid the freezing in form and meaning.

All this complex ambiguity of the gesture can be found in Urszula Wilk’s art. She clashes the temporary character of the gesture (and presence) with the durability of a mark. This paradox is expressed through “illegibility” of forms, in their languishing on the edge of the accident, irrelevance and unmeaningfulness. It makes us realize, it reveals the mechanisms creating the visibility, the aforementioned changing of visuality into visibility. The gesture, somehow by the force of matter, implies the concept of a scale. Therefore, a kind of re/scaling of paintings is instigated here. Beginning from the painting gesture, which reflects the scale of the human body, the painter confronts it with fragmentation (cutting of the painting), but also with the space of interiors or rather with luminal spaces (e.g. the project at the airport in China). As well as the general space, when paintings/covers were hung on building facades. There, the freedom of the gesture was complemented by the unpredictable game of moves caused by wind (Lines, Shang Yuan 2012). A game of mere irrelevances, of what is commonly considered to be irrelevant, unimportant, intangible and what does not enter the sphere of our visibility appeared there. Like moving air, like elusive shadows overlapping canvas. It altogether results in both layered marks and live presence of various moves – the painting gesture, wiggling wind or the cosmic movement of the planets (shadows), which commonly display what is the only real thing: changeability. Altogether, they change the painted surfaces into solid figures and a moveable spatiality. They also restore the nonfinite character of the paintings. Somehow by accident, a paradoxical complementarity of the visible and the invisible appears.

Urszula Wilk’s paintings constitute the space of movement and presence, whose traces evoke the feeling of other existence forms. They create a revitalizing intermedium, which resets our ability to imagine things. This art makes us abandon reactivity, it changes the viewer into a witness of a peculiar soliloquy, that is a stage conversation the artist holds with herself. The witness to a gesture mystery that releases the flow of subconscious feelings and thoughts. Her paintings are the concatenation of nameless forms and unspecified luminal spaces existing below or above our current visibility. And when they appear more clearly, they are given in plurality, in multiplication and ambiguity which invalidate their concreteness. Which discredit their visibility.

Of course, the cultural economy of recent decades is truly inherent in the imperative of hyper-activity and agential criticism. According to this perspective, “allowing the wind to exist” is not a heroism but rather helplessness or pure aestheticism. However, to overcome the contradictions of the contemporary world we must go beyond the understanding of form existing until now. We face the necessity to create its new dimensions, not only technological ones, but also the symbolic and conceptual ones. And moreover, as Roman Ingarden used to say, art is perhaps the conscious acting in favor of incomprehension10. Because it perhaps does not have new meanings, but only the rush and vigor of searching for them? Perhaps what remained is only waiting for the meaning (Odo Marquardt11)? Or maybe Hölderlin was right claiming from among the storms and ecstasy of Romanticism that peace is the sense of art? Luckily, we do not know the answer to these questions, therefore art is still needed. Even necessary!

1 › All fragments of Denise Levertov’s poetry were derived from: Denise Levertov, Sands of the Well, New York 1996 and from online publications of Levertov’s poems.

2 › A text published in Urszula Wilk’s catalogue, Wrocław 2013.

3 › Lao-Tsy, Wielka Księga Tao (The Great Book of the Tao), Warsaw 2009.

4 › See: Ernst Cassirer, Esej o człowieku (An Essay on Man), Warsaw 1998.

5 › See Alain Beaulieu, [in:] „Kronos”, vol. 3/2016.

6 › Wolfgang Welsch, Estetyka poza estetyką (Aesthetics Beyond Aesthetics), Cracow 2005.

7 › After: Lambert Wiesing, Widzialność obrazu (The Visibility of the Image), Warsaw 2008.

8 › After: Anne D`Alleva, Metody i teorie historii sztuki (Methods and Theories of Art History), Cracow 2013.

9 › Lao-Tsy, Wielka Księga TAO (The Great Book of the Tao), Warsaw 2009.

10 › After: Joanna Winnic-ka-Gburek, Krytyka, etyka, sacrum, Gdańsk 2015.

11 › Odo Marquard, Apologia przypadkowości (In Defense of the Accidental. Philosophical Studies), Warszawa 1994.