|
Jan de Weryha-Wysoczanski, "Revelations in Wood"
Centre of Polish Sculpture - Oronsko
Jan de Weryha-Wysoczanski is an artist of vast spaces.
He measures the rooms with steps searching for tensions, for learning their
properties; their 'reading' starts the
process of a certain taming, transforming. He introduces incredibly
sophisticated, delicate, meditating objects of wood emanating a rough beauty
and raw technology effects of many
months of struggling in the Hamburg studio. Next he forms ephemeral spheres,
softening the interior, immanent in the place - now the nine hundred square
metres room of the Museum of Contemporary Sculpture of the Centre of Polish
Sculpture in Oronsko. Revelations in Wood and Jan de Weryha-Wysoczanski's
earlier exhibitions have been considered great artistic events - one of the
most beautiful and most thrilling sculpture exhibitions of recent times.
The contact with these sincere attempts at defining the mysteries of nature
opens the processes of personal epiphanies
or even panteism and despite the absence of any narrating elements, it provokes
an intellectual polemics with the great phenomena of culture and narrating art.
The shimmering of The Wooden Table (2002) is built by the chips of rectangular
shapes. Only the surface skin -a fragment of tree bark, eludes geometry. What
may seem to be an element taken out of nature - is in fact its deconstruction
and simulation achieved by the segmentation of wooden pixels. The Wooden Column
(2003)- a cylinder massive in proportions, thick as on old oak, evokes respect
of a seemingly cult object. It is covered by a vertical arrangement of a
multitude of rectangular micro bark fragments - imitating its facture.
'By taking a matrix and decoding the connections, you refute the rule of '
negation work' indispensable for the
transcendental memory and refute the work of biological evolution (...) nature
and culture (...) in the sense of differentiation of species/ consistence of
what exists... '
Subconscious reflection on virtual reality very fast gives way to a therapeutic
ennchantment by listening. The roughness of wood chopped with an axe adopts
archaic meanings: oikos, the parchment ornaments, Japanese architecture,
architecture without architects, eighteenth century wood libraries and then
Brancusi's wooden sculptures, or specific, now degraded constructions of the so
called 'log houses' .
In the horizontal arrangements Weryha-Wysoczanski
|
|
brings into contemporary
times the entropies of land art and concretes of minimal art: phenomenological
spirit of Carl Andre's works, ephemeral activities of Richard Long, Robert
Smithson and other thinkers - the wanderers of the past century. On the other
hand he refers to the oldest traditions of world cultures: sand-spilling of
mandalas or delimiting the convent zones of contemplation.
The contact with these frozen and significant artist's gestures is fascinating;
they produce the glittering of the planks with the polychromy of fire,
uncovering the natural visualists' pictures in the section of tree veins. The
artist multiplies, builds structures, series, alternately merges and takes to
pieces, restores the power to dead trees, broken by wind, or meant to be
felled, such as young birches - the building material of the central Greek
cross-shaped monotone installation,
elevated to the rank of art. It is according to them that he set the stages of
the route along the active interior, awaking the forgotten sense for the
perception of art - smell. Young trees smell beautiful, in the artist's
intention provoking a reflection on how important a role they play in the
closed complex of ecological clock; their disappearance will mean an end of all
beings.
The long term contemplative process of mantric division, segregation, ordering
and discovering the
secrets of nature are for Jan de Weryha-Wysoczanski a kind
of ritual in which he recognizes and marks space.
Physical exhaustion restores
the balance of mind - complete peace. First of all there is no division between
what is life and what is art. You mustn't hurry, you mustn't lose yourself.
In 1999 in Neuengamme near Hamburg he realised a thrilling monument dedicated
to Poles deported after the fall of the Warsaw Uprising and all its Victims.
The artist focused here the echos of the 20th century ideas revolutionizing our
thinking. about monuments. On a square, ideally polished stone surface
consisting of 36 smaller plates measuring 90 by 90 centimetres, he placed in a
close architectural order thirty hand-hewn granite elements - indicating the
individuality of each human being. The road paved with granite aggregate
leading to the monument plate remembers of the gehenna experienced by the
concentration camp prisoners doomed to die. The Memory Zone delimited by the
artist from chaos of the world, clean and ascetic makes us stop, calm down and
keep silence.
Dorota Grubba
Jan de Weryha-Wysoczanski, Revelations in Wood, Museum of Contemporary
Sculpture, Centre of Polish Sculpture in Oronsko, exhibition open from January
12th to May 15th 2006. - Curators: Jan Stanislaw Wojciechowski and Leszek Golec
Translation from Polish to English by Maria Apanowicz
|
