BWA Contemporary Art Gallery in Katowice

‘In Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going To? Paul Gauguin has constructed a cultural allegory of fate and a linguistic ellipse. There’s no the dominant of ethnography and symbols which had been present in his earlier pictures. The carnality of painting (especially the expression and chromatics of colours) becomes more and more clearly the dominant of his late creation. On the other hand, however, the immaterial character of artistic discourse is more and more clear and powerful. Soon this will lead painting towards the language of abstraction through the deconstruction of the classical line and plane. Therefore the question which Gauguin asked in the title refers both to man and his situation within the world, and the status and condition of art and culture…
A hundred years passed by since the time of painting this picture. Questions asked by Gauguin still remain valid in spite of world wars that happened in the meantime, and in spite of human achievements of the last century, including groundbreaking discoveries in physics and landing on the Moon. In spite of dynamic development of technologies and new discoveries which enlarge the range of our knowledge, we can still state our ignorance as far as fundamental questions asked by contemporary man are concerned. The accompanying crisis in various areas of cultural communication coincides with the softening of the notional world that describes our reality. The impasse of the identity and figure of the subject has become a synonym of dilemmas which are felt by every man and each community in front of violently occurring changes. On the other hand, we should be aware that this feeling is nothing new. Even though the Heraclitean principle of panta rhei had been announced two and a half thousand years ago, it’s worth remembering that the aspect of coming to being and passing by is still paradoxically the only sure and unchangeable feature of the incertitude which accompanies our life. The rest is faith and belief… No wonder that the irresistible need and compulsion of imaging and describing both ourselves and the surrounding world has become a panacea for the fear of changeability and fluidity of the world. Man can’t live without image and reflection; this results probably from the belief that grasping the speeding life in one frame or phrase can be a remedy and the answer to the passing by. Man — as Arvydas Šliogeris once wrote — can be open at the world only looking at it through the glasses of myth. No doubt, art is one of the punctuation marks of this anthropological discourse. (…)’

Roman Lewandowski
‘Post-Gauguin or the myth of image and imaging’ — introduction to the catalogue

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