Many critics analysing art history strive towards showing its linearity and that the creative work of each artist is the interpretation of their predecessors’ oeuvre. Marcin Jasik, a visual artist from Warsaw, falls outside such classifications. He deals with abstract art, and his works are a compilation of various techniques and styles, and an interpretation of his personal, existential reflections. Our conversation takes place a few days after the opening night of his solo exhibition at STRABAG Artlounge in Vienna, as part of a prize awarded in a prestigious STRABAG Artaward International competition. Marcin told me about his paintings, his philosophy of creation, and the behind-the-scenes of the STRABAG competition.
Julia Gorlewska: In 2022, you were the finalist of one of the most prestigious competitions – STRABAG Artaward International. Thanks to the prize, your works have become part of a private STRABAG Artcollection, and in mid-February, they were presented as part of your solo exhibition at STRABAG Artlounge in Vienna. Could you please tell us about the competition itself? Why did you decide to take part in it? What is the submission process like? Which of your works did you decide to present?
MJ: This is a truly fantastic competition with a great reputation and high recognisability. The decision to apply was completely natural and obvious. Besides, I had a good feeling about it since the very beginning and after being informed that I had passed the first stage of the selection process, I thought I could really reach the final. You had to select three pieces for the competition and provide additional information about yourself – publications, exhibitions, university qualifications, etc. Meanwhile, a Polish bank that has been creating an amazing collection for a few years now expressed a wish to buy my paintings. Therefore, I had limited freedom in choosing my works. My submission for the STRABAG Artaward competition included paintings of diversified form, but they coherently presented the pattern of signs and ideograms referring to the same theme.
JG: It has been a few days since the opening. Which of your works did you decide to present?
MJ: I started working on the exhibition with Vanessa Bersis a few months before the opening night. We discussed what we should focus on, and what works could be used to tell a certain story. Further selection and discussions took place a few days before the opening of the exhibition space. The idea was to choose paintings that would show a cross-section of the series I painted in 2022. Hence, the exhibition is diverse and demonstrates my research process and increasingly selective treatment of the scene from Giotto’s fresco. We focused on searching relationships, which sometimes arise from a relatively brutal juxtaposition of paintings that seem to compete against one another, only to further showcase paintings that are basically diptychs and complement the previous ones. We wanted to break a certain type of harmony and space symmetry and disrupt it in a way. To enhance the effect, we used my works-objects as separate and, in my opinion, very autonomous examples of my creative work.
JG: Has any exhibition catalogue been published yet?
MJ: Yes it has! I enjoy this process because it is a ceremonial enclosure of time into something handy. It allows me to ‘page through’ the paintings and to perceive them in a completely different way, which is always useful and developing. The catalogue is accompanied by two, recently written texts. I managed to collaborate with Andreas Hoffer, curator at Kunsthalle Krems, and Paulina Olszewska, who represents, among others, Galeria Studio in Warsaw. It was wonderful to see how two different sensitivities and approaches to my painting come together This is perhaps one of the most pleasurable moments when my own creative work is filtered through their knowledge, associations, and individual traits. These texts are simply excellent! STRABAG Kunstforum also placed great confidence in me, since the publication was created in relation to my solo exhibition in Vienna.
JG: You deal with abstract painting, which by its very definition is difficult to perceive as it requires focus, the right approach and knowledge. Last May you took part in an exhibition entitled ‘From Abstraction to Abstraction’ organised by The Stefan Gierowski Foundation. In your opinion, what is understood as abstraction nowadays? What is abstraction to you?
MJ: I would not like to advance the thesis that abstract painting is more challenging to interpret than figurative art. It is not about the division or rivalry between one language and another, but rather about the possibilities they offer. I believe that abstraction has other means to generate new codes and signs, it is like developing a new alphabet that can become completely legible or at least progressively more clear to recipients. You know, it is like swimming around an island without reaching the shore. The shore is incredibly boring – there’s nothing there but sand! In fact, for many people, it is abstract art that is the less intellectual form and I can easily agree with them.
Photostory: Women in Abstraction A new vision of the history of abstraction from its origins to the 1980s
What exactly is abstraction?
Women in Abstraction raises several questions. The first concerns the very term of the subject: what exactly is abstraction? Another deals with the causes of the specific processes that made women invisible in the history of abstraction that still prevails today. Can we continue to isolate “women artists” in a separate history when we would like this history to be polyvocal and non-gendered? Lastly, the exhibition establishes the artists’ specific contributions, whether pioneers or not, but in all cases stakeholders in this original and unique history.
JG: Why?
MJ: Have you noticed that when a non-figurative painting is dominated by shades of green, it is most often entitled ‘spring,’ with four colours, we approach summer, and the end of the year is dominated by inspirations from the art of Franz Kline. Abstraction has this strange consent to make absurd statements – ‘I don’t know why, but I’m expressing myself.’ I think this is a serious problem.
JG: How do you deal with it?
MJ: If I happen to be in an internal monologue in which I am trying to define what abstraction is, I tend to negate any thesis I put forward, and I always come to the same conclusion – ‘I don’t know.’ In fact, I am not sure if I should know what it is, because if I did, I would cling to what ‘I know.’ Besides, if we assume that we think only through words which essentially should be logical, ordered and should express a system of meanings, then pure abstraction does not exist.
JG: I perceive you as a mature and aware artist. Your art is a correlation of the analysis of iconic motifs, human values, psychology and your own experience. What else do you pay attention to in your creative process? I wonder if you are guided by any compositional key which you use to ’encode’ your canvasses.
MJ: The creative process is brutally simple, it just requires creating. Creation needs to have a reason, purpose, direction, content, and awareness of why a given work is being created and how it resonates with the previous ones. The code you have mentioned is created thanks to the latter, but the thought of it gives creation a tangible form. This is symbiosis.
JG: Would you call your paintings expressionist or more thought-out, mathematically planned works?
MJ: I could refer to my previous statement here, but since I don’t do sketches but work on a ‘living organism’ right away, I leave myself a margin for slip-ups. There is something wild about paint, and it is a matter that likes to dominate and show off its strength. Slip-ups, mistakes and succumbing to controlled coincidence are all very important. Tolerating them as well. Let’s assume then that 7-4=6.
JG: Would you like painting to be ‘legible’ to recipients, to carry a specific narrative? Or is the inspiration only for you as an artist, and your paintings should speak at a completely different level?
MJ: Of course, I would like that! This is how I understand the sense of painting, to create a dialogue between a painting and its recipient. However, the language of abstraction is, as a rule, less communicative and it is incredibly difficult for recipients to accept the whole package of contents right away. I don’t know if it’s possible…. but I believe that painting will allow me to find out.
JG: Let’s talk about the series in which you analyse a scene from Giotto’s fresco entitled ‘St. Francis Renounces all Worldly Goods.’ You have interpreted and shown the tension between the spiritual and the mundane and human through abstraction. Why did Giotto’s fresco affect you so much, why did it move you?
MJ: It is simply a fantastic fresco that somehow found me many years ago. It is one of those sounds which get into your head and clatter there. It is legible and simple in its form, it clearly refers to the notion of faith, perhaps the consistency of pursuing it, and finally understanding and deciding that this illusiveness becomes an objective determining our choices. It has a distinct division into two spheres – St. Francis himself, or more precisely his arms in the prayer gesture, is the clear point that unites them in a way. He is the only figure who is absent and detached from the bottom part of the fresco. Giotto also pioneered the Proto-Renaissance, with a breath of freshness and colours. In fact, his works are genre scenes. I don’t think about faith in the theological sense, although the fresco, with its clear connotations with Christianity, allows me to use the things that are natural points of reference to faith in European culture. I treat it as one of the key ‘energies’ which seems to approximate some archetype-like element in the human mind that makes us act because we have this irrational feeling that we are bound to succeed.
JG: Your paintings and objects are a compilation of various artistic techniques and styles. You merge pastels with spray, you modify scenes and you play with form. You explore and analyse the subject matter of the series from every possible side. What is the purpose behind it?
MJ: I treat the creative process as a continuous transformation, and in my reasoning, I compare it to death and rebirth. Abandoning the things that were very close to me not so long ago, with a certain vague need accompanied by the satisfaction of erasing or reducing something. It is a form of contradiction and questioning. It allows me to look at seemingly the same things while noticing differences and new subtleties. To expand my observations and further research, in my works of 2022 which refer to the logic of signs I had constructed before (in works of 2021), I needed to disturb the signs. My role is to construct these processes and intentionally demonstrate the transformations.
JG: What changes took place in your most recent series?
MJ: I removed the distinct bottom part, let’s call it the ‘street’ zone. I removed the characteristic red pastel which was previously a clear reference to the ‘sacred’ sphere… The role of St. Francis’s arm itself (a symbolic combination of the sacred and the profane) – the diagonal line it marks out in the original work, has become the dominant feature of this year’s works and so I decided to intensify it. It became superior in the construction of both form and content. This time it did not point to either sphere. The entire process of reduction is rather an attempt to describe a smaller fragment of the fresco and strip it of its original context.
JG: In the most recent series of paintings there are also paintings-objects. What is their function?
MJ: While working, I decided that I had to bring the ideograms closer to the audience, to somehow explain what they are and where they came from. I thought of creating paintings-objects that would serve as lighthouses or maps with a legend during the exhibition. I used the reproduction of the fresco to create them. The whole work is clearly framed and in fact, it resembles a coffer in which two planes are visible. The transparency of the first layer allows us to notice the subtle outline of the reproduction, and as we approach the work closer it gains a figurative character. The works bring to my mind a moment of observing the world through a steamed window. Everything is filtered through blue air and mist.
JG: A lot of critics compare you to famous and valued abstract artists. Do you feel that you are a continuator of certain artistic traditions or rather their creator? What is your definition of inspiration?
MJ: I’m not sure if it is possible to avoid being a continuator. It is rather a natural process of exchange between generations, which can be said about not only painting. But I have never had an idol or clear-cut fascination with other artists in my life. I would rather fight against authorities, and I still can’t understand that there are people who have idols. I guess I don’t need much, all it takes is a bit of everything.
JG: We live in a time when technology becomes part of everything, even in the sphere of art. I am curious about your opinion about artistic novelties, NFT, for example. Will we be able to view your work in the form of a token someday?
MJ: NFT? I don’t understand it in the context of painting. This reminds me a bit about LED lights on graves. It is good when smoke is coming out of a candle wick, and it smokes differently when the wind blows. A LED candle is the shore I mentioned before!
JG: We are talking shortly after the opening of your solo exhibition at STRABAG Kunstforum in Vienna. In 2021, during Warsaw Fairs, all your works were sold, and you have had a track record of numerous exhibitions in Poland and in the Czech Republic. Considering your young age, this is rather dynamic career growth. Do you have any plans or dreams regarding your artistic career? Where would you like to showcase your works? What painting themes would you like to develop?
MJ: Good question! This refers a bit to your question about the communication between my works and their recipients, and as you put it, the ‘legibility’ and communication of the subject matter… I would like to create paintings that don’t need my existence so that I’m not an element that adds content to them. The paintings themselves should be an unquestionable record of thoughts. As for the rest, time will tell. At the moment, I am focusing on my creative work.
