In contemporary visual culture, Catherine Malabou’s concept of ’plasticity’ offers an opportunity to reflect on the potential of what lies between the dichotomies imposed by Western culture, such as nature and culture (artifact), what is considered male vs female and artificial vs corporeal. Plasticity characterises the relationship between materiality and accidental events accompanying the evolution of form, which by taking on a new shape, irreversibly destroys the possibility of returning to the previous form. For Malabou, plasticity means the ability to evolve the form of the subject and its accompanying enthusiasm to give or take a new shape through the conscious selection of the components that constitute it. It seems this is the key for Warsaw based artist, Szaweł Płóciennik, who creates non-binary bodies on painted canvas, escaping the classical aesthetic categories.
Scraping, mixing acrylics, oil paints and working with an airbrush
After the summer exhibition of paintings at the seaside headquarters of the Eduardo Secci Contemporary gallery in Pietrasanta, Tuscany, on November 24th, Płóciennik presented his works in Florence at the experimental NOVO space. The process of testing various forms of artistic expression is characteristic of Szaweł Płóciennik’s painting, taking place through formal experiments, consisting of combining various painting techniques on canvas, adding and subtracting layers of emulsion, scraping or mixing acrylics, oil paints or working with an airbrush. These numerous well-thought-out actions lead to the effect of creating a world of intertwined human and non-human subjects, captured in the process of deformation of simplified geometric shapes that mutate into superimposed humanoid masks.
The influence of the neo-avant-garde canon of the 1980s
Płóciennik’s work undoubtedly shows the influence of his mentor, Jarosław Modzelewski, a painter,illustrator and a member of the famous Warsaw-based art collective Gruppa. In the 1970s and 1980s, members of this group painted figurative paintings saturated with colour, which were ultimately to be categorized by the public as unsightly. The direct personal involvement of the artists in the social problems of martial law in Poland translated into an artistic language realized in neo-expressionist aesthetics. In their practice, Gruppa members were not indifferent to the tendencies developed by contemporary artists abroad, representing such trends as Neue Wilde or Italian trans-avantgarde. It was the exploration of color saturation, the construction of simplified forms, experimenting with painting techniques such as oil on canvas, woodcuts, and collages that made the artists of the collective find in their works a method to express social tensions and their personal dilemmas in the face of censorship of their work by the Polish ruling apparatus. Gruppa members perceived reality as absurd and grotesque, and the realities they saw as devoid of noble values. The freedom of the individual was expressed in the ’wild’ nature of painting as an expressive, powerful gesture treating a canvas saturated with colour, full of provocation, bitter irony and obscene representations of bodies; it was a response to the brutality of the political sphere.
Like the artists who created the neo-avant-garde canon of the 1980s, Płóciennik is not indifferent to the socio-political context of his times. In his deliberations, he analyses contemporary critical discourse, trying to work through the problems faced by his masters and the contemporary Polish artistic community.
Undoubtedly, an important point in the artist’s work was last year’s exhibition at the Warsaw Promocyjna Gallery entitled Obrazy uczuć religijnych (Insults/Images of Religious Feelings), which perversely referred to art. 196 of the Polish Penal Code, which provides for the offense of insulting religious feelings. During this exhibition, set in the Polish socio-political context, where the public was still shocked by the most recent re-enforcement of the law banning abortion, the artist presented to the Warsaw audience carefully arranged portraits full of deformed non-binary humanoids with abstract skin colour, which nevertheless emanated affirmative energy.
The artist’s position in contemporary socio-economic uncertainty
Płóciennik, by experimenting with painting techniques on canvas or by publishing reflective essays in academic art magazines, studies the creative process and tries to analyse the problems of the artist’s position in contemporary socio-economic uncertainty. The category of plasticity helps to capture the dynamics of the artist’s creative process, who puts the painting of canvas to the test by carefully modeling the layers of emulsion on its surface, carefully examining its saturation with color and light. Płóciennik explores his subconsciousness by gradually mixing painting techniques and carefully studies religious and mythological references and associations from childhood stories in the subjects of his works. The result of formal experiments is the creation of a world of non-binary bodies and the deformation of their humanoid shapes, which change under the influence of the forming on the surface of the canvas, mutating into figurative geometric forms transforming into bodily tissue.
The multi-layered narrative about the world around him
The pieces presented in the Eduardo Secci Contemporary gallery create, in a sense, a calendar of seasons that follow an intimate, symbolically marked narrative. In the work First Snow (2022), the ephemeral mood is intensified by the presence of fragments of dynamically superimposed masks, created by emulsions of spray and oil paint mixed on canvas, and then scraped off in parts on the surface of the depicted humanoid body. This processual creative strategy brings to mind Hans Hartung’s abstract painting. In The Troop (2022), Płóciennik depicts a patchwork family, in which the category of plasticity allows us to imagine a community composed of a human giant living in symbiosis with a puma, a pierrot and an insect, presenting the community as a living organism consciously formed by human and non-human subjects. Night Prayer (2022) is a perfectly modeled bas-relief in the tones of the nocturnal landscape, depicting the world of the humanoid body in the poetics of a dream, whose convex shape emerges from the frame.
The painter consciously tries not to abstract his figures from the context, so that they do not lose the aura that accompanies them. This performance brings to mind a vision of dying anthropocentrism, in which human bodies are inevitably forced to consider sharing space with other non-humans. By publishing reflective essays and placing his paintings in the local social context, Płóciennik tries to capture a multi-layered narrative about the world around him. It is the processual nature of his work that provides the opportunity to study the saturation of color and light on canvas, and formal experiments with texture and play with the complexity of the symbolic layer affecting the viewer; the stronger it is, the more the artist deviates from the intention of realistic representation of forms.
Written by Aleksandra Lisek
Szaweł Płóciennik “With One Eye Open”
24/11/2022 – 14/01/2023
NOVO space di Eduardo Secci
Piazza Carlo Goldoni 2, Firenze
@secci_gallery
@shavel.plociennik
C. Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality, Dialectic, Routledge, New York 2004.
