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1. It was relatively early that you developed your own language of artistic expression, a unique way of representing reality. How do you perceive the changes that have taken place in your oeuvre until now? Aren’t you afraid of copying yourself?
I began by analysing various relations that may occur between painting and photography. Back then, I worked with landscape, which I found the most neutral substance for these considerations. In the theoretical part of my MA thesis I wrote something that now seems to me a bit ludicrous – the need for creating a total image. If I was to review it somehow now, I would say that I still want to create a strong and stable model of reality, which is, quite paradoxically, expressed by the willingness to undermine what we see. At some point during all these years, I resigned from landscape and photography in painting to tackle the matter of urban tissue. I began recording my interventions on video. In my work, I involve passers-by, crowds, spectators i.e. everything that I previously dogmatically ignored. It is often the case that the effect of mimicry – the painting is being torn off reality and lays this reality bare, while it also becomes unmasked and uncovered itself – is so strong that you can easily get stuck at that stage. It is exactly this moment that the video shows. For me, it’s a vital stage, since I have much respect for the so-called ordinary audience – people who seldom visit exhibitions and expect mainly artistic virtuosity. If you really want to ‘dig’ into the matter, though, you’ll discover that The Aporia of Painting was an experiment with traditional painting and a sort of trap for the audience, whom I wanted to make aware of certain schemata of reality perception. On their part, Revitalisations in Sanok are a cynical commentary on reality, in this particular case, on the wave of thoughtless revitalisations, which is spreading all over our country. The Sanok project was also an attempt to face the phenomenon of hooligans and hostile town dwellers, who keep an eye on their territories in dirty backyards, where nothing has changed for years; invisible from behind the renovated facades.
In both these projects, I worked with painting, ‘mimicry effect’ and video, however, the repetitiveness is limited to means and tools – everything else is different: the context, the environment, the people... These exhibitions stemmed from one another, but to talk of repetitiveness is to claim that Sanok and Wrocław are identical cities with the same kind of space, dwellers and problems. In Shanghai, I also painted and made a video. But what I found intriguing was the extent to which the city is torn between tradition and history vs. economy and globalisation. The two worlds that exist in polar opposition to one another, but remain close. The project is precisely about this. About the millions of Chinese - invigilated and intimidated but still smiling... I am not trying to hint at anything directly and I am very far from a thorough economical, sociological and political analysis.
I regard my role as an artist in other terms. If it happens so that within the frame of the video a woman appears examining a waste container in search of anything marketable as a recycling material, exactly when I’m in the middle of creating an abstract painting, then I don’t make a manifesto out of it. It’s rather that I point out the somewhat paradoxical collision of the two worlds: utter poverty and art. The rest is up to smart critics.
You know, it is the matter of looking at reality that’s of the utmost interest to me. In the Shanghai video, there are several abstract images to be seen – a homeless person under a plastic bag, a stylish shop window in the background... These things merge, mingle and overlap in one frame. My task is rather to show this odd part of life, and not e.g. to appeal to the rich for sensitivity towards the problems of the homeless.
To return to the question, right now, I’m most intrigued by the possibility of setting certain traps in reality. It’s something like a philosophical argument in favour of relativity, ambiguity and confusion of what we see, but shown with the simplest methods possible, without any visual manipulation.
2. Why have you actually become interested in the subject of the city, buildings and urban infrastructure in general?
I’m not interested in architecture in the urban or historical sense, but in its responsibility for the entanglement in how we see the world. I carry out my experiments in the city, since this is now my most immediate environment, the most familiar one. The audience can also access it easily. This is where I live. I’m intrigued by certain visual processes within the urban tissue and their changeability. The city is an amazing source of inspiration, the sense of being inside a certain mechanism, an image which is shaped visually, or even in a similar manner to painting, with subsequent layers of paint. I have always been interested in actions located between art and sheer painting. The paintings in a trash container, invisible or abstract paintings, which are at the same time functional. Searching for a paradox and elaborating on arguments in favour of painting’s superiority, and the simultaneous tarnishing, throwing mud and civilisation waste at painting.
The majority of my projects are in situ actions. You go to see an exhibition at the gallery where you’ve been so many times before, you walk down the streets you know so well. But this time you pick a map from the gallery and I provoke you to go outside again and take another look at your environment. And suddenly it turns out that the base of the telephone booth, a part of the wall, railings or the electric box door are all paintings. I deprive you of the sense of certainty about what you see. It’s a painting-based argument in favour of the relativity theory.
I spend a lot of time in New York. When I am there, I get the feeling that many activities carried out by people around are a kind of art: theatre, performance, painting... Maybe it’s because I am a stranger – I wasn’t born there, I don’t speak perfect English, I don’t understand the entire American mentality – all this enables me to perceive reality in such surreal and hyper real way.
3. Is the street a good place for painting?
It’s an excellent place for painting! With everything that happens there, with all the forces that act there! You know, I have a certain project on my mind: I would like to create a series of paintings where my work would undergo a 100% reduction, and everything would appear as a result of the processes and forces within the urban tissue. I’ve already chosen one venue i.e. the New York subway, but because of necessary insurance, permissions etc., such actions are not welcome there. I’ve done a similar series in Sanok, then I moved the works to Wrocław, but I still can’t get enough and I want to explore the matter further.
4. Does it matter to you whether your urban projects are carried out illegally or with permission?
I don’t tend to think a lot about it. I’m guided by common sense and intuition, I like risk. Once, I installed my paintings on a wall of a building in Soho, although the owner had explicitly forbidden it. I had put a lot of effort into the paintings, and the act of fixing them there was essential to the project. It turned out that no one even noticed the difference.
I never use drills or nails. I fix my paintings in the least invasive way possible. I’ve long ago forgotten about stretcher bars, and when I work in the street, I stretch canvas on fibre board. If someone kicks the painting, or steps on it, there is no damage.
I’ve had some real guerrilla actions, such as installing a large painting in the NYC subway (where you basically cannot even take pictures) several years ago. I had a lot of difficulty and was a bit apprehensive. But, to my surprise, when I had already put it there one night, nobody noticed and the painting survived in a very busy spot for two months. I think it’s mainly about common sense and safety. I would never install a painting in a way that would pose a threat of falling on somebody. On the other hand, though, when I was last working next to the SculptureCenter in New York, a police car stopped next to me and I was told to remove the painting, but eventually I fixed it again. The police just had to do their job, probably called by someone who noticed that I was hanging around the construction area at night. The probability that the painting posed on a wooden block, 20 cm above the ground, could do any harm was so low, that I didn’t hesitate to take the responsibility.
5. Why haven’t you remained a street artist?
Because I never was entirely such an artist and I didn’t associate myself with the street. I’m interested in the complexity of seeing and how the context influences what appears to us. And the two contexts – the street and the gallery seemed to me polar oppositions. A painting has a function in the street, it becomes an integral part of reality, while at the gallery, it is purely abstract. What I do is take abstract painting from its pedestal, deprive it of its intellectual superstructure, lay it bare. But is it total? I constantly get further and further away from the painting in the traditional understanding, however, I still haven’t crossed a certain technological border – oil on canvas. Hence, as long as I use this technique, even if I extend the limits of painting, I still remain rooted in its classical framework.
6. What values, impossible to find in the urban space, can you receive on the part of institutions like art galleries?
Actually, even though the majority of my recent works first functioned in the urban space, there was always a possibility to display them at a gallery. A gallery can grant you money for carrying out a project, which you otherwise rather wouldn’t be able to find in the street (laughter). But seriously, a gallery is a good place for summing things up – a clean and sterile situation, which you can fully control. The street is lively and risky. Some time ago, one of the paintings at the SculptureCenter (probably the best one...) was lost even before the opening of the exhibition. Yet the most interesting things result from mixing the two zones – the street and the gallery – from transposing meanings and contexts.
Last year at the BWA Gallery in Zielona Góra, I was supposed to carry out an ‘invisible project’ i.e. to create paintings but not to tell anyone where they were. However, I could not respond to the situation where an institution would sponsor something invisible and impossible to find. Eventually, I just showed the Shanghai video, where me and a certain poor, Chinese woman were rummaging a trash waste container. I had my paintings and she had her recyclable materials. But I will surely go back to Zielona Góra and carry out a project that targets the gallery institution itself, at its own expense, although I still have to think more about it.
7. Do you see yourself in the future as an artist of the gallery or of the outdoors? Do you think you could lose interest in the city and work only on projects in the gallery space?
Certainly not exclusively... This year, I’ve planned urban tissue projects in Israel, Serbia and Taiwan, but I have also been working for two years on a series of paintings that have their origins in the urban tissue, but will not be installed anywhere apart from the gallery. It’s a very work-intensive project, and because I’m always away, the work takes very long. I have recently started working on a sort of dummies of reality – spatial painting objects, which are basically utterly abstract and invented forms.
8. Do you separate your professional activity, engagement in art and work from existential practice? Is it possible to differentiate between life and art in your case?
At high school, my friend used to say maliciously: ‘one is not an artist, one only becomes an artist from time to time’. I was analysing it thoroughly back then, and I totally disagree. (I don’t get back home after eight hours in a workshop, just to fulfil a totally different role. When I was sick some time ago and stayed at home for two weeks, it was a perfect opportunity to think about certain issues and projects, without any bad conscience about not doing this or that). I am not the kind of artist who’s fanatic about his ‘mission’, but it is really difficult to differentiate between work, life, passion and hobby when you’re an artist. Daily life was the source of numerous situations, details, settings to the self-portrait series Them, which I have been developing since 2002. It has recently been published owing to CSW Zamek Ujazdowski in Warsaw in the form of a book.
9. How much time do you spend working in the street? Do you earn a living from painting?
I’ve only just started to. Last year, I sold my works to Zachęta’s collection in Warsaw and Wrocław as well as to several other important collections. I was working part-time as a waiter in New York, which was an excellent experience that taught me respect and distance to myself, life and art.
10. What is your experience of working with the context of spaces and venues? Do the works come into being as a concept first, or rather as a response to the experience of a place?
I usually make two attempts. Firstly I go, see the place and take photos. Then, already with an initial plan or idea, I begin to carry the project out. If it is not possible to visit the place beforehand, I appreciate if curators can send me some photos. However, in the case of China, such photos were not much of an inspiration and didn’t stimulate my imagination. Then I decided to adopt a different approach. I assumed that before going there I would learn nothing about the country, its history and culture. I went there entirely clueless. I remember that, just before the departure, a friend handed me a map of Shanghai, which later on proved very useful. Going to China, I wanted to rely on very simple and basic associations, and thus carry out a project on the spot. It worked in a brilliant way, but I seldom work like this.
11. To what extent is the impact of the work on the urban space planned?
Sometimes it’s really difficult to plan something in advance, because it might occur, for example, that if you paint the sun, someone later on might feel encouraged to turn it into a swastika. In the urban space, in the chaos of the street, it’s better not to plan anything ahead, because when I finish my work, somebody might as well come and throw it away, take it home or destroy for some reason. This is exactly the profile of such projects. It is the city that guides you. You only open to these forces, look for situations and places, where your work could provoke actions and reactions on the part of the people. But you still cannot predict the results. The most boring moments are those when nothing really happens, the best fun, though, is when the surprise is so big that you don’t have any clue what to do with it and how to get out of the situation.
12. What’s the actual motivation for your work? What’s the aim?
Provoking ambiguous situations through simple methods. Setting traps and asking about the way we observe reality, what we see and what its essential parts are. Demonstrating how easy it is to manipulate image. And finally, showing that our environment, permeated by philosophy, politics and religion, can still be simple, fresh and interesting.
13. What are your memories of the artistic education? What did you have to struggle with? How would you evaluate the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts?
When in the primary school, I attended Mrs Waga’s extra classes in arts, I was a star and everything I did was brilliant. In artistic high school, some people thought I was an „underachiever”, but my painting teacher, Mr Bijas tap me on the shoulder in recognition of my work. All that time I had an immense longing for becoming an artist, but not enough skills and enthusiasm for learning how to draw, say, a galloping horse. Then I went to the Academy of Fine arts in Poznan, where it was easy to poke a stick in a stack of flour or blow up a bag and analyse the existential dimension of this installation. It was much more difficult, though, to make oil paintings and remain modern. But then again, I may be exaggerating because there are certainly as many excellent installations consisting of flour, sticks and air as crappy paintings on canvas. At the Warsaw Academy, I was lucky enough to find myself among the first people enrolled to professor Leon Tarasewicz’s workshop, back then not even officially a part of the institution. It saved me from getting near other workshops. However, as for the topics connected with the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts, such as ‘what do I owe?’ or ‘authority’ etc., I’d rather not make any comments now.
14. The question of the identity of image has always been central to your work (I mean your battles between photographic and painted image). Are we surrounded by images that are no longer authentic, by copies of reality and copies of these copies? What attitude can an artist adopt towards such status quo?
An artist can try to present his own version, as long as he believes that it extends in some way our knowledge of the world. The „being of an image” is an intriguing matter, indeed. In the United States you may notice that a stucco pretending to be marble is generally taken for real. Nobody seems to need, or even have the awareness of the authentic stone. Yet the image of an image, simulacra and other phenomena of this sort have already been analysed thoroughly enough. We live in post-postmodernist times and the debate on copying, lack of originality, repeating images is no longer so lively, since this state of affairs has been universally accepted. Interestingly, it did not mean the end of art and the death of painting. I think artists become researchers now. And the most interesting projects are based on cooperation with engineers or architects. Recently, I’ve attended Andrea van der Straeten’s lecture in ISCP in New York, where she presented her project carried out with an Italian architect. It concerned transmitting sunlight to rooms without windows. It was interesting, futuristic, ecological. Unlike a real scientist, an artist can afford a larger margin of error, risk, creation only for the sake of creation. The fusion of art, ecology, architecture – this seems to be the future for artists. Getting back to the imitation of marble in America, if you think about it, you start to discover that their approach is much more ecological than digging for and carving the real stone, which will sooner or later run out.
15. How do you choose the scale of your work?
It’s always 1:1 - one of the values that are default. Apart from that, there is always the oil on canvas technique and the colour, which is also pre-determined by reality. My role as a painter is reduced to the minimum. I leave intellectual speculation to theorists and art historians. Thus I contradict the values that are accepted in painting, but I function within this realm and carry out consecutive projects.
16. Do you plan the way of recording every urban intervention?
I don’t have any particular way, but I am aware of the fact that it always has to be found in order to get across to people. A year ago, Sara Reisman from the Queens Museum encouraged me to carry out a project with hidden paintings in Corona – the Spanish district of New York, which had been undergoing revitalisation for some time. The process itself was supported by, among others, the museum with its series of artistic projects. However, I couldn’t imagine the act of painting and intellectual considerations in a such a poverty-stricken place. I came up with something entirely different, quite functional, but since my project concerned the subway, it was not accepted. I don’t regret it, though, because it still seems to me that through my projects I should not only fit within the visual tissue, but also adapt to the people and social conditions.
17. Which of your works do you consider to be the most complete so far? Which one gave you the sense of satisfaction?
It’s always the last one. But seriously speaking, it’s my last work at the SculptureCenter in New York. I think that I managed to grasp the specific character not even of the venue, but of something more. I’ve taken several very simple elements, which are easy to find in any street, outside their usual context and presented them in a different manner. These paintings, which are in fact complex spatial solids, fit well not only into the context of the street, but also of the American abstract art (my fascination). I also have very good memories of the project in Ivano-Frankivsk. Not only because it gave me a unique opportunity to work in a museum with such an immense collection, but also because the result of the project was a light and amusing combination of classical sculpture, icon, polychrome altar and abstract painting. What’s more, it was acclaimed as a certain revaluation and a new look at what the local people know so well, yet what is somewhat forgotten and uninspiring. Another project important to me was organised at the Fondation Deutsch de la Meurthe in Paris.
18. What does work offer to an artist – comfort, satisfaction, anxiety? What stimulates subsequent choices, further research?
It’s the awareness and the sense that something will be left after me. Something that extends the knowledge of the world, has an impact on the mind and dismantles certain mental sets. But it is also the constant anxiety and search for new links.
19. Your projects are seen by thousands of people. Does this fact influence the process of creation in any way? Do you take the audience into consideration? Do you believe that average passers-by will even notice your intervention? What do you expect their opinion to be, what would you like them to think?
In these several projects that I made outdoors, I wanted my interventions to remain unnoticed and live the life of other elements of reality. I don’t think art is for everybody. It takes enthusiasm and time. But that’s just it. Or maybe so much. These paintings only seem to be for thousands of people.
20. Were there any poor works? Have you ever destroyed them and does it happen that you leave unfinished paintings in the street?
The last time I destroyed a work was during my studies, however, my last work was lost several weeks ago in the street. It had been fixed to a wall, which was disassembled and taken away when I wasn’t there. You know, I’m more keen on contradicting such categories as ‘hit or shit’ and provoking situations where they cannot be applied. That was the theme of the project at the Foksal Gallery in 2005. How could you say that the paintings on the wall were poor or badly painted if in the photographs they fitted the landscape so well that you couldn’t actually distinguish them? I try to look for such paradoxes. Obviously, there are projects which I’m a bit less satisfied with. And there is one, which I had been doing since 1999, putting a lot of effort into it and making several thousands of pictures. Eventually though, I decided it made no sense to continue it.
21. Your early inspirations? Whose oeuvre had the largest impact on your perception of art? Which artist influenced you the most and was the source of energy to create? Which tradition do you find particularly worthy?
When I was at high school, I was fascinated by Opałka’s approach, but also by abstract expressionism. It might be difficult to find a common denominator for Opałka’s consistency, repeatability and order as well as streams of spilt paint or water stains straight from the brush led by free movement of the hand in abstract paintings. Then, there was of course Gerhard Richter.
22. Could you characterise your latest works in terms of current interests and contexts? Do they belong to a new stage or are they a continuation of the previous research.
At the CSW in Torun, I am now showing something that takes me into an entirely different dimension. Monika Weychert Waluszko insisted that I take part in an exhibition devoted to the countryside. I knew right from the beginning that I would be unable to do anything on site, since I had already planned a trip abroad. However, owing to great involvement and help on her part, I managed to prepare an installation for the exhibition. When I was in Lucim at the end of last year to see the spot, I traced certain elements that had been adopted by the villagers in a way that totally modified their meaning... And I took them to the exhibition space. The installation also forms the entrance to the entire exhibition.
23. Are there any breakthrough dates in your career? If so, why were they important?
The year 2000 and the first individual exhibition at the Biała Gallery in Lublin as well as the year 2008, when my works made it to two important collections.
24. What book would you take with you to a desert island?
A blank notebook and a pen... (laughter)
