Jerzy Łuczak - Reviews

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The space of mystery (Maciej MAZUREK)

Jerzy Łuczak is an artist of pathos. For him, the order of feelings enchanted in a work of art is more valuable than a conceptual idea. A work of art should first influence emotions and only secondly on the all-contriving intellect. It should give rise to metaphysical longings. And it should be beautiful. Łuczak searches for sanctified space, which is at the same time the space of man's homeland and its destination. This is a dead programme for many. For many, art is equivalent to commercial goods. But for artists comparable to Łuczak, the worth of metaphysical experience is unmeasurable. He began as a late student, aged nearly forty. And an adult man’s decisions are different in terms of their weightiness than those of a teenager. His graduation work, which was displayed at the Jesuits’ Gallery, brought awareness of this art’s importance, situated within the extensive sacral current. Drawing is the artist’s preferred form of expression. Łuczak creates large-size works. In his search, he uses the experience of Hokusai, a Japanese artist of the turn of the 18th and 19th century. On one of his works, Hokusai impressed a leaf on paper, then painted a frog on it. Łuczak, who uses impressions of a human body immersed in paint, also refers to Ives Klein’s pagan anthropometry. The painter’s own experience as a lettering and signboard craftsman cannot be ignored, either. Drawing seems to offer more extensive creation opportunities for the artist’s impulsive personality, as it is a flexible form that allows for correction of mistakes. A line once drawn is not final. Sometimes incidental scratches on the surface or a fingerprint would open new labyrinths of space, which are emanations of that available to the artist. Wonderful consistency of the ‘baroque’ form and content has its source in Łuczak’s work being not only perfectly crafted drawings, but also creations of internal vision, a spiritual ‘parallel’ world. For an artist, matters of life after death, or astral wandering are not abstract. Łuczak does not conceal his Christian views. For a contemporary modernist mind, this imagery must appear anachronistic. Łuczak’s naive visions, which are so powerful with their naïveté, depicting the eternal struggle of good with evil, his beautiful “Jacob’s Ladders”, refer to boyish dreams and visions of the power of justice. Shadows created with a light touch of pencil or brush seem to dance and rotate. We do not hear any music, but we are still haunted by Johann Sebastian Bach’s violin concerto, with the music of the spheres transposed to earth. There is certain bright transparency in Łuczak’s works. White, black and all possible shades of grey emanate violet and yellow, creating a mystical aura that brings to mind Jarosław Seifert’s wonderful poetry volume entitled A Concert on the Island. This association with Seifert is probably not accidental. Łuczak is a man of the suburbs. He is a craftsman living his everyday life in a world of people equal to him, for whom the measure of artistic skill is the ability to copy a photograph accurately. Therefore, precision takes so much importance in Łuczak’s works. But at the same time, Łuczak is a refined artist, enthusiastic towards anything that’s new. He does not try to escape formal experiments. He used to process old masters’ paintings with such techniques as photography, stencil, photocopying, and computer processing (e.g. Descent of Christ from the Cross by Roger van der Weyden). However, this was only a preparation to his magnificent cycle of drawings, which bring cognizance of the existence of the realm of mystery through the artist’s imagination. This realm may only come into existence provided that we seek wisdom and art in the power of spiritual or sensualistic experience and not in the intellect.