“Selected histories” 11. 06, 2018 Mokotow/s-ka Gallery, Warszawa
“Plastic Pressing in Classic Conditions” (“P.P.W.K.”)
In the old days, kings led their armies to lead soldiers into battle. Often the outcome of the war was determined by a direct duel of chiefs fought on the battlefield. Modern leaders keep a safe distance from the places where the conflicts they cause take place.
The little boy laid a piece of paper in front of him, picked up crayons and began to draw a battle. When drawing, he imitated the sound of gunshots, the whistle of bullets, the hum of airplanes and tanks engines, the cries of cavalrymen and the groans of the wounded. He was so excited he drooled, hooting and hissing. When he got bored, he put the paper aside and he forgot about what had been bothering him a moment ago.
Sixty years later, the same boy, in an elegant uniform decorated with colorful patches, watches on a large plasma screen, briskly moving figures of soldiers and vehicles. Once they make contact with the enemy, colorful, effective flashes appear. The show attracts attention and resembles a children’s game from years ago. At the same time, somewhere far away, hundreds of kilometers from the safe and comfortable bunker, a real war is going on. Black and white. Nobody thinks about colors here.
Serhiy Savchenko
Deceptive color? No, color comes first!
What connects trinkets scattered in the artistic disorder and colorful conflicts. Are the scattered, seemingly insignificant little things we see in the “Little Things” series just a formal game of color and composition? It could be assumed if they had not been confronted at one exhibition with “Colorful wars”. Both cycles were created at the same time. By focusing our attention on the coloring, “Trinkets” present a microcosm of mutual dependencies of seemingly trivial, scattered elements. Frames in which colored dots, spots, spots and streaks, frozen in relation to other elements, bring to mind images from under a microscope. To see their mutual interactions, you need to give them a moment of attention. Seemingly chaotic, they create intriguing worlds of mutual references. It is worth taking a closer look at them – maybe they are images of the community, seen from a distance, colorful, vivid. This trail is suggested by the second series – “Color Wars”, where spots and dots are “organized” differently in the frames. Divided into two colors – “our” blue, the enemy red, as in war games, seemingly stripped of its own identity. Nevertheless, colorful and effective, they lack the compositional freedom with which they entered into relationships in the first cycle. Conflict, also the one created by the artist on canvas with the help of painting means, requires a change in the organization of the painting space. In comparison with the Little Things, you can see that the tension, intensity and dynamics come at a price. The price that societies pay for militarization is also to change its structure. In fact, no matter who wins – blue or red, with time the world will again start to sparkle with a full palette of colors. Color will remain.
Mateusz Sora
Texts: selected histories mokotowska2018
