Jerzy Kałucki — Categories of Space II — looks for solutions of some selected artistic problems
Jerzy Kałucki is one of the most outstanding Polish painters. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow; since 1981 he has run a painting studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznan. He debuted at the 3rd Modern Art State Exhibition in Warsaw, 1959. He is connected with the well-known artistic formation of Cracow Group.
Kałucki’s output is consistently set in the scientific current in art. He ceaselessly looks for solutions of some selected artistic problems in the area of various disciplines (painting, stage design, drawing, printmaking, spatial constructions and installations).
He is interested in studying relations between the elements of space, movement, colour and light. He uses first of all geometrical forms, reducing the picture to arcs, lines and planes. He often utilises the trick symptomatically used by conceptualists: in his/her imagination a viewer reconstructs a part of an arc, which is not painted (visually disintegrated), but only precisely counted.
Bożena Kowalska writes, ‘Kałucki is far from any irrational divagations. However, beside this rational and conscious attitude, which he reveals without opposition, there is another side of his personality, which seems to be half-concealed or only half-realised and not fully accepted. This other side makes that the purist economy and geometrical rigour in his works are eased by the factor of lyricism, and that their mysterious space can lean towards meditation. The same feature allows him to (...) articulate ‘the conviction about coherence of the world, in spite of numerous, it would seem, evidences that it’s quite on the contrary, the conviction about the existence of a principle (…) At present we can not define the principle precisely; we feel we are drifting apart from it (…) In my opinion art gives the chance to bring us closer to it, even in an absurd way’. Not only has his conviction about the existence of that unknown principle indicated at an irrational element in Kałucki’s nature. It is also proved by the abstractive notion, accepted by the artist, of harmonious coherence of the universe as well as the notion, created by him, of ‘geometrical space’ — both equally abstractive, imagined and ‘foreboded’, but empirically unverifiable. This range of his experiences and emotions makes that his works, in spite of mainly intellectual inspiration and mathematic working out, are not only perfectly balanced formally, but can be characterised by that magnetic attraction, hieratic character and magic, which make them to be the art of the highest order, a significant and moving artistic, but first of all spiritual, experience’.
Curator: Bożena Kowalska
