On the Outside

The middle of this picture has a chair, with forms and motifs and figures fading into a multitude. This is a symbolic place for experiencing your emotional state. Around it, untamed thoughts, concerns, hopes, and memories whirl around. The picture shows this universe as conjured up on the outside. At the top, in the red cloud, we see a figure drifting away, and fragments of faces and scenes reach our eyes from all around, transferred to the green surface of the imprimatura. Below, in the lower parts of the canvas, someone is climbing a mountain. This whole crush of events whirls around a central prop, the chair. 

Krzysztof Mężyk added this note to a picture titled Shame. This concept also cropped up in our conversation when we looked at Krzysztof ’s pictures with the exhibition in mind. 

This was our first meeting for some years; the last time was in 2014. Back then, Krzysztof sporadically titled his pictures, but generally he avoided doing so. In the conversation with Maciej Monkiewicz published in obieg.pl, he explained that, while each of his pictures was different, they could all be called the same thing, so titles were unnecessary.

Krzysztof Mężyk was thirty years old at the time, and was a “hot” new name—a young painter from Krakow who had given the art scene an intriguing and unexpected direction. His non-figurative, densely painted, enigmatic pictures defied language; it was hard to tear your eyes from them, but equally hard to speak about them. Concepts wouldn’t stick to this painting—unless we stopped at analyzing the formal aspects, describing the range and assortments of colors, tracing the brush strokes. Yet where did this analysis get us, given the one thing we can say for sure about Krzysztof Mężyk is that he is no formalist? Much less a zombie-formalist. The pictures from years back did beg comparisons with informalism—viewers clutched onto this eagerly, wanting to have something to grab onto. In the aforementioned conversation, Monkiewicz asked the artist about this. Krzysztof admitted there could be certain analogies, but his project has never been about a dialogue with art history, and all similarities to people and events of the past is accidental, and definitely not intentional. 

Stach Szabłowski (curator)

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