In contemporary visual culture, Catherine Malabou’s concept of “plasticity” offers an opportunity to reflect on the potential of what lies between the dualisms imposed by Western culture, such as nature and culture, what is considered male and female, artificial and natural. Plasticity characterizes the relationship between materiality and accidental events accompanying the evolution of form, which, 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 the accompanying enthusiasm to give or take a new shape through the conscious selection of the components that constitute it.
Szaweł Płóciennik, installation view at NOVO space di Eduardo Secci Contemporary, photo Stefano Maniero, courtesy of the Artist and Eduardo Secci Florence – Milano
It seems that it is in this key that the Warsaw artist, Szawel Płóciennik, creates non-binary bodies on the painting canvas, escaping the classical aesthetic categories. After the summer exhibition of paintings at the seaside seat of the Eduardo Secci Contemporary gallery in Pietrasanta in Tuscany, on November 24, Płóciennik presented his works in Florence, in the experimental NOVO space. The process of testing various forms of artistic expression is characteristic of the painting by Szaweł Płóciennik, taking place through formal experiments, consisting in 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.
Szaweł Płóciennik, installation view at NOVO space di Eduardo Secci Contemporary, photo Stefano Maniero, courtesy of the Artist and Eduardo Secci Florence – Milano
Płóciennik’s work undoubtedly shows the influence of his mentor, Jarosław Modzelewski, painter and illustrator, a member of the famous Warsaw-based art collective Gruppa. In the 1970s and 1980s, members of this group painted figurative paintings saturated with color, 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 created 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-avant-garde. It was the exploration of color saturation, the construction of simplified forms, experimenting with painting techniques such as oil on canvas, woodcuts, collages that made the artists of the collective find in their works a method to express social tensions and personal dilemmas in the face of censorship of their work by the Polish ruling apparatus.
Szaweł Płóciennik, installation view at NOVO space di Eduardo Secci Contemporary, photo Stefano Maniero, courtesy of the Artist and Eduardo Secci Florence – Milano
Gruppa members perceived reality as absurd and grotesque, and the realities they saw as devoid of related values. The freedom of the individual manifested in the “wild” character of painting as an expressive act saturated with color, full of provocation, bitter irony and obscene representations of bodies was a response to the brutality of the political sphere. Like the artists who created the neo-avant-garde canon in the 1980s, Płóciennik is not indifferent to the socio-political context of his times. In his deliberations, he analyzes the 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” (“Images of Religious Feelings”), which perversely referred to art. 196 of the Polish Penal Code on the offense of insulting religious feelings. During this exhibition, set in the Polish socio-political context where the public was still shocked by the entry into force of the law banning abortion, the artist presented the Warsaw public with carefully arranged portraits full of deformed non-binary humanoids with abstract skin color.
Szaweł Płóciennik, installation view at NOVO space di Eduardo Secci Contemporary, photo Stefano Maniero, courtesy of the Artist and Eduardo Secci Florence – Milano
Płóciennik, by experimenting with painting techniques on canvas or by publishing reflective essays in academic art magazines, studies the creative process and tries to analyze the problems of the artist’s position in a situation of contemporary socio-economic uncertainty. The category of plasticity helps to capture the dynamics of the artist’s creative process, who puts the painting canvas to the test by carefully modeling the layers of emulsion on its surface, carefully examining its saturation with color and light.
Szaweł Płóciennik, installation view at NOVO space di Eduardo Secci Contemporary, photo Stefano Maniero, courtesy of the Artist and Eduardo Secci Florence – Milano
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 works presented in the Eduardo Secci Contemporary gallery create, in a sense, a calendar of seasons that follow an intimate, symbolically marked narrative.
Szaweł Płóciennik, installation view at NOVO space di Eduardo Secci Contemporary,photo Stefano Maniero, courtesy of the Artist and Eduardo Secci Florence – Milano
In 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 they are given, lest they lose their aura, and this action brings to mind the vision of a dying anthropocentrism.
Szaweł Płóciennik, installation view at NOVO space di Eduardo Secci Contemporary, photo Stefano Maniero, courtesy of the Artist and Eduardo Secci Florence – Milano
Through the processual nature of his paintings, setting them in a local social context or writing reflective essays, Płóciennik seeks to capture a multi-layered narrative about the world around him. It is the degree of awareness of the saturation of color and light on the canvas, the formal experiments with texture and the play with the complexity of the symbolic layer that impress the viewer all the more the further he deviates from the intention of realistic representation of the forms.
Info:
Szaweł Płóciennik
24/11/2022 – 14/01/2023
NOVO space di Eduardo Secci Contemporary
Piazza Carlo Goldoni 2, Firenze
www.eduardosecci.com
Born in Poznan, graduated in Performance Studies from the Jagiellonian University of Krakow. She is enrolled in the two-year course of Artistic Curating at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence. In her research she focuses on institutional and decolonial art criticism, on the ecofeminist and performative vision of culture and art in ecological crisis.
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