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We have known each other for a brief eternity, maybe just a longer moment. And it wouldn’t even matter. It wouldn’t even matter if it wasn’t for the fact that we talked about the essence just for a moment, just by mistake. Luckily, we never need to. He seems to be leading this double life. We hear: a grey relief, painter’s bas-relief or a colourful object shaped like a sweet candy bar. It’s just a speech, a talk. Sharp-Rock. I think: memories, reflections, deep breath when no-one is looking. It’s a barely heard rustling of something that fills the inside to the brim. It’s his dualism of searching, the double life. The reminiscences of those petrifying and multipronged foreign armies marching into patterns are just to efface the traces of the essence of his so personal art. By patterns I mean the paintings. Skinned alive and deprived of dreams. He leaves them standing clad in their own sensuality. Far-fetched paraphrases, yet so acutely close. And truth be told the art is only one. It is his. Sometimes he means it. Sometimes it’s just a fancy. Sometimes he spits out when it hurts. Sometimes it’s just a game. It excludes nothing and changes nothing. I never ask about the hierarchy of importance. I know perfectly well that, for him, lack of strong spirit inevitably closes the path to truth and truthfulness. To mix aggression and softness in one may be the domain of masterpiece and faith. It may also be an act of bravery, the ultimate baring of one’s soul. It is his treatise on the superiority of the naked lie over the naked truth, whatever you may choose. A wizard – free and easy. A goddamn good painter. Janek – here’s to you! Agata Zawistowska |
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My friend Jan Pruski – he’s a wild bird. |
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Cześnik and Pruski
Demented, really, bless ’em. One sad, the other happy; and the sad one’s quite happy, and the happy one a bit sad. They can turn death into a joke and take comedy seriously. Different personalities, similar souls. Their artistic experience is human experience – for them, painting, thinking, living is a moral issue. Gut feelings settle matters of technique, primer, colour, brush and stroke; existential questions are their focus of attention. Students and apprentices can have problems with interpretation - looking for reasons for what these two do, why they paint on road signs, on waste paper, why they produce tiny scrawl. But the masters are not to be questioned, they are the point of reference. Their shared consciousness isn’t collective consciousness, just the first step to it. The similarities flowing from these two consciounesses of depiction are striking: but the connection with naive art, with art brut, with Jean Dubuffet, with the new expression, with the brutal theatre of Antonin Artaud is a mere prosthesis of the artist’s experience, telling the blind about colours. Cześnik and Pruski have fun with these associations that we poor inhabiants of the iconosphere have to trawl up; look, no fragments of the ‘pixelosphere’ here, this choking and atomizing of our perception of daily life with digital cameras and mobile phones. Their work is not everyday, but holy; partly, not wholly, religious art; and from stream of consciousness inscriptions in their work we discover what is going on in their minds: the creative work of the hand in the faithful service of the subconscious. But why the frequent appeal to disdain, suffering and extermination? Perhaps it’s like this: in our lives we set up our own units of measurement, imposing our own scale on distance, time, weight, temperature, emotion, effort, erotic attraction; and for many of us (and for me) Auschwitz is a waymark, both topographic and moral. And not on the national scale (the racist insanity of the Nazis, Jewish-Polish-German relations) but universal, a negative waymark, a black hole, an ethical ‘anus mundi’. Auschwitz provides a moral perspective, an antithesis to Mecca on Muslim airline TV screens pray in this direction. From Auschwitz, an icon of the grim potential of human nature, we should turn away. But we can’t disconnect ourselves from it. It’s not a prosthesis. Auschwitz, our little homeland. Piotr Olszówka, Berlin, 19.05.2009 |
| ..and so I had to define my attitude to all those coils, cylinders, phallic emblems and whatnot. Landscape is obviously three-dimensional by nature, but we somehow tend to transpose it onto two dimensions, and then all of a sudden you get three dimensions again... that never fails to surprise and inspire, and it's not merely a question of that aesthetic force where observation reaches beneath the surface of things. In that sense the objects the artist hints at are transparent. It's, you know, very sensual, it can be touched, you can almost smell and walk among these "landscapes." It is new and it is fun - it has always been like that with Pruski: he has fun, and you have fun looking at his pictures; he enjoys his work - and it all smells of lakes, reeds, sweet flag, it is Mazurian in its mood and intent...
Sometimes he is a Picasso, drawing a nude with a single line or tossing off erotic "shenanigans" on the paper. Another time he is a Dubuffet, inspired by ritualistic African sculpture when he covers kitchen planks with black geometrical patterns or when he sets his "Two monks" in rhythmic rhombuses. He can be a WOLS when his line becomes nervous, delicate and creates wholeness and meaning as if against its will. His views of the lake-land are a response to the "concrete abstraction" of Leon Tarasewicz not only because his pared down idiom renders the landscape of northern Poland with no less compassion than the Belarusian painter does the beauty of its eastern borderlands, but also because both artists take landscape painting beyond two dimensions: Tarasewicz fills interiors with landscape by painting directly on adjacent walls, Pruski lends a vicarious, parallel existence to landscape within the object - a pipe, a block, a solid board covered with the speculation, the suggestion, the veneer of a landscape. He does not treat minimalism as a means to an artistic end: it is a value in itself which in his Mazurian landscapes achieves a unity of representation and atmosphere - for how better to capture the silence, calmness and ascetic greyness of the misty lake, the island outlined in rushes and reeds, or the intuited shoreline? Only by showing yourself unsure that they exist, especially in terms of form, tangibility, and susceptibility to being put in models and patterns. Pruski is no stranger to this hesitation, so befitting the methodological sceptic: "Maybe it is. Maybe it isn't. Maybe this way, maybe that. What does exist is my doubting in the obviousness of the you see it all, the way you see me, my art, our undoubtedly beautiful world!" .... I don't care whether his affinities are elective or accidental, and besides you can't paint as if no one had ever painted before, and reading references to predecessors into an artist's work is like stringing beads onto the necklace of culture. Just assume that he's become another Hakuin, that those bricks and pipes of his are just a Zen joke on the inability of showing the blinding light of the real - like a phenomenologist, he only grants true existence to that which appears to him in direct observation. I accept your sublimity but I prefer listening to the silence of these paintings, to the rustling November silence on the bank of lake M. reeds on the island the lake shimmers within me the ducks leave today You said there was no point writing about art? Not about trivial art there isn't. Piotr Olszówka |
| Well, I thought Jan Pruski had calmed down and settled down a bit, after all those dramatic warriors, his “Teresas” and his “Sickheads”, and that he'd finally got the urge to take it easy and say to himself 'time to put my feet up for a while.' I thought he'd be contemplating his calm, refined landscapes - or rather his echoes of landscapes - not only his canvases, but also his three-dimensional forms, cylinder surfaces and blocks...
But what have we got? An eruption of distaste for the world. Hammering of fists on the table. His new cycle 'Klatki' links with the ancient theme of the dance macabre, morality sobbing over the wretchedness of the world. It's a whole little theatre, full of dolls on wires, folk in prison, incapacitated, bound together with string and wire, packed in tin can coffins. Here's a couple tied together for good and bad, from birth to the grave. There's a gaggle of people packed together in a cage; unhappy wretches, restrained by strong fetters, they remain motionless in the eternal ritual dance of life and death; and among them saunter spectres, their names emblazoned on sashes: Deceit, Jealousy, Hate, Gossip. And what are these three figures doing, with their smart ball gowns and white crowns, like masks from the Carnival of Venice, strutting a step of the gavotte from Mozart's Don Giovanni? One thing I know. I wouldn't have wanted to get in our Jan's way while he was creating his little world of theatre. The load of phlegm and fury carried here is enough to strike you down with a thunderbolt from a substantial distance; his anger bears the power of a Voodoo curse. Tadeusz Szyłłejko |
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Rhomboids. Landscape materials. Means of recognition. Jan Pruski is on intelligent artist. Watching him work I was struck by his concentrated, decisive approach. His whole body paints - his intellect marks out the direction, he reconsiders, re-forms earlier work and takes, from the many possible paths, the next step forward. Each stroke is emotional, impulsive, passionate, his artwork verges on brutality. All these intermediate steps are, though, a result of Pruski's reflective, ruthless self-focusing. An impulsive process of creative thought and energy is apparent. Pruski wants, I think, to create in us, his viewers, a certain reverie and intelligent appreciation, together with emotions bordering on obsess/on. His works are not 'art brut’ as we know it from the works of Dubuffet or the psychiatrist, Prinzhorn. We may talk here of the classic understanding of the landscape form, of mystical primaeval shrines, fantastic drawings - fantastic because they are born from a fantasy of complex structures with secret entrances - not a copied form but an archaic prototype. In Pruski's work rocks become inhabitable apartment blocks. His works are not reflections of himself, not memoirs or a description of the state of things. These are prototypes, pictures within pictures, to me they are a source of the most important questions; who am I - where have I come from - where am I going? Who knows? Pruski does not completely desert us, leaving us alone with his artwork, but he offers too little help in the learning of his alphabet, giving us too much freedom: he allows us to conceive our own images - he himself looks on, distant, reserved, reticent. Wild thoughts' of the kind described by Claude Levi Strauss, are provoked by his artwork. The beauty of his visions of nature soothes, and induces contemplation - such visions there certainly are - but at the same time these visions portray another aggressive, threatening side of nature. There is a palpable hunger for freedom, exposing us to constant discontent. This dichotomy is disturbing. Jan forces himself on his budding creation like a demented warrior, like a punk wrecking his guitar. Brutal strokes, violent lunges, clawing, stabbing. His use of soft brush strokes is rare. His raw material: cement, glued paper, cardboard - he rips it off, sticks it anew: again and again. He cuts thick gashes into the picture, fills them, like dry needle technique, tarry blackness, smearing, rubbing the whole work, constantly repeating the same manoeuvres. Suddenly very subtle, delicate forms begin to emerge, landscape, elements of countryside, which nonetheless fail to hide their scars, their painful inheritance, possessing beauty without illusions, respected, untarnished. Like cult figures in rites of passage. Eventually one can discern filigree boats, boats, or perhaps only sails and masts, those elements Indispensable for sailing away - boats in the distance, in an uncertain and yet hopeful future, Finally he reveals to us his one real 'means'. Jan Pruski, the intelligent artist shows us the means, processes, thoughts and actions - but not the banal. Jurgen Huber |
| Dear Jan! I appreciate you engaged your talent to protect memories from forgetting - memories of those who were closed behind the barb wired fences. Some of my friends described that horrible time in their books. I think that nobody could speak out those memories that are still so painfull. For almost twenty years I have been avoiding all those people and things that could recall those painfull memories. I was afraid nightmares could return. I was afraid one of them especially: I run breathless carrying the sack with food - I see skeletons of little kids (nutritional oedema recedes after death) - kids try to push open eyelids with fingers - I awake and still hear mothers howling. During last months at majdanek I have been working at isolation hospital. Kids. Mental patients. There was one thing I could not do - I could not write numbers on gaunt bodies. I asked my older friend to do it form me. I offered I do all the hard work for her. Transport from Witebsk - gaunt mothers and gaunt children, beautiful Jewish kids. All of them straight to gas. I asked WHY? Me - the true believer, yes, I blasphemed. And in the evening we tried to recollect happy moments. We sung songs composed in the camp. We even organised theatre. Life had two dimensions: the first - everyday nightmare and the second - evenings after apel - ours although aufseiress often appeared 3.11.1943 - with the accompaniment of waltzes and operetta songs eighteen thousands Jews were gassed. We saw this from the window of the barrack on the fifth field nearby the crematorium. We saw a woman who climbed from beneath the dead bodies. We started to shout in several languages. The esesman womancalled "Lumpish" dragges her back to ditch. Single shot. Silence. It could be me. It could be one of us. Everyday. But among beasts there were also true man. Well...Iremember...Sick of typhus I am on the track going to crematoruim. Half conscious. I can hear the engine pumping cyclone. I hear somebody shouting: "Hedwig Wolska". I cannot speak a single word. I pointed at myself. Jewish woman sitting near me shouted: "Hier is das". I saw Rainertz. My friends asked him to take me back. I fainted. In 1977 I went to Dusseldorf. I felt I had a debt to pay. Rainertz was released. Soon after this he died of heart attack. Well I could describe my stay in the next camp. I could describe how I met my husbend camp`s doctor. But this is still opened wound. It still hurts too much. Jadwiga Wolska-Landowska |