Paweł Kowalewski says he has never stopped painting, because after all, Totalitarianism Simulator and Strength and Beauty are paintings, too.
Totalitarianism Simulator takes the form of a cramped interior, a kind of time capsule for viewing photographs documenting the bloodiest, or perhaps most inhumane, acts of violence perpetrated by people on other people, interrupted by images of idyllic normality. It’s almost like in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, a 1971 film that seems old from today’s perspective. In Kubrick’s film, watching was unavoidable. In the case of Kowalewski, it is voluntary. In both cases, projections provoke the viewers’ opposition, the need to close their eyes. And in both cases, they are supposed to have a therapeutic effect: to cure aggression by watching images of horror combined into a single continuous narrative. Except that in Totalitarianism Simulator the viewers see their own face at the end and have to ask themselves what their involvement in that spiral of violence was. Those are effective therapies, but they produce individuals who then find it difficult to survive in a world ruled by violence. Kowalewski obviously knew Kubrick’s film and made a conscious reference to the therapeutic methods depicted in it. Maybe because four decades after the premiere of the film not much has changed in the sphere of violence, and people still unload their hatred, anger, and complexes on others. Or they “follow orders.” Only the number of documentaries has grown. An artist is a person of ideas. That is why the artist tries to realize utopia by putting before people’s eyes what they are capable of.
Strength and Beauty: A Very Subjective History of Polish Mothers, from 2015, was not actually meant to be about collective memory, but was also related to therapy; the artist was working through the mourning for his mother. He printed her photograph enlarged to a print of 200 × 140 cm, a portrait in fact, and surrounded it with portraits of other women from her generation. A generation whose youth fell during the war. Whose youth was interrupted by the war. And whose youth was scarred by experiences that their children, who grew up in the shadow of unspoken memories, excessively, obsessively protected from experiencing the total violence of war, did not experience. And also from the eventuality of experiencing a similar trauma. But their children could get a general awareness of their parents’ youth by simple analogies to what they learned from literature, film, the press, television and everything else that makes up collective memory. Like the entire “second generation,” they absorbed it indirectly, putting that general awareness in the void of their mothers’ moments of silence, sighs and reverie. Fragmented narratives were created, which sometimes underwent shocking corrections when the mothers broke their silence. Kowalewski heard his mother’s story in the last days of her life. It turned out, as in many similar cases, that she was not the person he knew—who she was considered to be during the war and long after it. But he also understood that somewhere beyond words, without resorting to confessions, she had been able to shape him as she should have. She had found other ways to make him sensitive to what was most important in a human being. And this is what became fixed in him when she died. That is why he painted her portrait, just like the others, with vanishing paint. Her facial features faded from week to week, and after a year they were only a pale shadow of the original image. She disappeared as she appeared, from oblivious memory. What remained was the awareness of what he owed her.
Hungry for more?And what he owes her, among other things, is historical memory, strengthened by his activity in the “Black One,” known as the place where the unruly hone their talents, a scout troop at the Tadeusz Reytan Secondary School. Translated into paintings, it could be seen already in his diploma work, when he painted Zdzisiek jumps off every night…. And when he co-founded Gruppa in Warsaw, he painted a work that was emblematic at that time, Mon Cheri Bolsheviq, a portrait of a Red Army soldier with white eyes, devoid of pupils. And many other paintings, commenting on the memory of the Second World War, suspended in the reality of martial law, often depicted in a less obvious way than, for example, his Tales from the Katyn Woods.
He painted uglily, like the whole Gruppa and like Andrzej Wróblewski a few decades earlier, who decided that matters of final significance could not be painted nicely. And like some outsiders of the New York School, who stained their paintings with deliberate blemishes—of both colour and technique. Painting nicely is easier. And, of course, better absorbed by the public. But is it necessary for an artist who wants to irritate the viewer? To make them feel uneasy, or even opposed. To unnerve them, as Totalitarianism Simulator later did. From this point of view, he fully continued what was at the heart of his early painting: refusal to accept what things are. And this was the azimuth of his later observations. Turning on the charm and social imbalance of the times of transition, evidenced by the questions making up titles of his paintings, such as Where to hang the Virgin Mary? A flood of ideologically correct art, which made him give up painting for a few years.
He travelled the world. But the needle of the compass kept pointing to areas of disagreement. So he brought back from his trips photographs of zones of inequality and divide, of permissible and forbidden activities, evidence of social Darwinism being practised in railway stations and airports gleaming with glass and steel, at the entrances to public buildings. He saw no historical turning points, no new deal in a world where there was a continuity of the old way of thinking, and where someone was still not allowed to do something. What was—and is—different, more elegant, was only the staffage.
So it suddenly became clear that the photograph Europeans Only, taken a few years ago in Pretoria, was compatible with documentation showing Nazism’s development. In the autumn of 2019, it greeted viewers at an exhibition with the apt title Tell me about yesterday tomorrow, considered one of the best exhibitions of 2020 in Europe, held at the Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism, on the site where the movement was born almost a hundred years earlier, in 1921.
A lot of time passed between one photograph and another. At one point, the artist suffered from an illness that could have taken a terminal form. This purely somatic phenomenon had its effects on his psyche, also affecting his way of thinking. It made him revise, once more, the hierarchy of values he avowed. In the spring of 2019, he flew to Portugal hoping for a “reset.” This is how he reported it to me in one of his letters:
For the first time in a very long time I started to hear my thoughts, then my gaze fell on a patch of light, and there stood my suede shoes, which had devoured all the light…. Well, then it went on somehow.
It was then, in a Portuguese town, that he bought crayons and a pad of drawing paper. Like a primary school pupil. And soon after, he returned to classical painting, with paints on canvas.
The paintings are small. Of course there is an intrinsic similarity in them to those from years ago. But these are more compact, and their distinctiveness is often of a poster-like nature. Some look like abstractions, though they are not. They contain the simple observations and simplified statements that characterized his very early drawings, made with a felt-tip pen in a graph-paper notebook: Weak people, Speaks fucking bullshit, Anotoś, Flies.
These new paintings are generally more densely painted, though one still reads in them an earlier, deliberate nonchalance in the way colour is applied and the brush is run. One of the first depicts the suede shoes mentioned in the letter, which turn black in the painting, as in the title: Black, very black shoes eat light. On a yellow abstract background. A viewer unfamiliar with the story that took place in Portugal must settle for the beauty of this painting. The same is true of the other paintings. There is a story behind each of them. Or observation. Or observation combined with reflection. They also have a lot in common with the photographs from the FORBIDDEN! series; they were often created as a memory of a journey, but in a more condensed form.
Most strongly, they are affected by Africa.
My African dreams about colour are patterns of percale fabrics worn by African beauties, painted on canvas. Negating the laws of physics sometimes brings surprising results: In memory of President Juvenal Habyarimana 1937–1994: grey airplane, black crescent, white crescent, reddening background. It takes some effort to link this image with the plane crash in which Habyarimana died and which became the pretext for Rwandan genocide.
The four-leaf clover, or everyone has something on their conscience: DC Congo. Anyone with even a passing acquaintance with the history of this region needs no bitter commentary on this, the title of a cheerful picture in a somewhat naive style. Not everyone knows that such a golden clover was worn around the neck by a security adviser to African governments, a Belgian commando who had millions of victims to his credit.
British tears, red and white “crocodile” tears against a background of dark blue, in the colours of the Union Jack, shed over the consequences of the country’s colonial policy in Africa.
This kind of gap between the appearance and meaning of the image and the bitter irony emerging from that gap is also an echo of youth, and thus grows into a constitutive feature of Kowalewski’s artistic work. It may be rooted in his youthful experience of growing up in the poverty of communist Poland, hardening during the oppressive time of martial law.
It is in Africa that the memory of that socialist poverty returns, when the artist is sitting by the pool in a posh hotel or drying his designer briefs there, and suddenly puts himself in the place of a “local man” in his mind. Then he looks at himself, a poor Pole of the 1970s, through the eyes of rich tourists from the West. After all, his status in Africa today is the status of that Western tourist from half a century ago in Poland. The pecking order is global, and colonialism is no longer based on slavery but on the price of luxury. Two further paintings speak of all that: Pants in the sun, or neo-colonialism, and Fuck, I live in an alternative reality. But again, rather cheerful in expression. And like the schematic Golden frog, or apjnkyerenekjkjr, or the formally similar Goldfish, or nsuomnamkjkjr. The apjnkyerenekjkjr and nsuomnamkjkjr are popular symbols of luck and good fortune in Ghana, often made of real gold. When the country’s president, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, dons traditional attire, he decorates his sandals with them.
These are just a few examples. As the series grows longer, the characters and titles multiply: Devils, three devil’s claws shaped by the lava of the still active volcano on Stromboli, and shaped on canvas by the power of the artist’s imagination. Sicilian heart, or the motif of pots, popular in Sicily, seen by him. Happiness, a childish white cloud, lined with pink, painfully banal, conventionally levitating in the blue of the background. Destiny, a predatory green “paw” superimposed on an active pink surface. Painkiller, a white “capsule” on shattered black. And many others, covered by a common title: Objects created to stimulate the life of a mind, or the invisible eye of the soul. Full stop.
Kowalewski believes that we live in a world in which reason has gone bankrupt. He sees this every day, even if his observations focus only on objects, although essentially this is not the case. It is he who tears them out of context, transforms them into signs, and places them in his paintings.
Art liberates. Art purifies. This is probably why he returned to painting. Despite it all.
-
Paweł Kowalewski, Black, very black shoes eat light, from cycle Loneliness, 2019, oil on canvas, 100 x 80 cm, private collection -
Paweł Kowalewski, British tears, from cycle African Dreams, 2019,oil on canvas, 100 x 80 cm -
Paweł Kowalewski, Happiness, from cycle Loneliness, 2019, oil on canvas, 100 x 80 cm -
Paweł Kowalewski, Pants in the sun, or neo-colonialism, from cycle African Dreams, 2019,oil on canvas, 100 x 80 cm
Paweł Kowalewski’s exhibition “Objects created to stimulate the life of a mind, or the invisible eye of the soul” 28.05 – 31.07.2021 in Gallery of Contemporary Art Winda in Kielce, Poland.
