I assumed that achieving an interesting painterly surface could evolve into the conceptual value of a painting (understood as its content or subject). I therefore equate continuous experimentation with painterly matter and painting technique with the search for the “content of the painting.”
I search for this content in autonomous, unfamiliar painterly spaces. For years, I have had the feeling that, in the course of these explorations, I am stretching a certain invisible membrane. At times it was so tense and thin that I could almost see what lay on the other side. I saw beautiful, mysterious spaces—and subjects emerged from them almost on their own. And then I would make one move too many…
A single wrong decision is enough to irreversibly destroy a painstakingly constructed painterly phenomenon. These phenomena are constituted not only through the composition of the image (which can always, in a sense, be reconstructed), but perhaps above all through the individual “resonance” of the painting. This subtle vibration—difficult to describe, yet strongly perceptible—can easily be disturbed in an irreversible way. I have the impression that I have left behind thousands of such nearly discovered, yet ultimately “ruined” and forgotten worlds-images…
The search for painterly space can also be likened to solving a mathematical problem with many unknowns. In practice, attempting to solve such a problem usually unfolds over many years of experimentation: struggles with selecting the idea of the painting (or an idea “for a painting”), the properties of the paint, the material of the support, tools, methods of painting, and the search for an appropriate, concluding painterly gesture. All of these aspects form a kind of painterly equation, which will either be resolved correctly (resulting in an internally coherent image), or with errors that disrupt the integral clarity of form and the suggestiveness of the message.
There came a moment when an experiment in painting produced a particularly compelling result. I managed to discover—and, importantly, remember—a specific sequence of painterly gestures. This time, the membrane, already stretched to its limits, broke, and the reality I encountered on that metaphorical other side of the mirror drew me irreversibly into its interior.
The number of phenomena suspended within this extraordinary landscape—without horizon, without top or bottom—is impossible to describe. The space is experienced as infinite. It may resemble an oceanic depth or a cosmic void, yet densely filled with extraordinary phenomena: organic structures seen as if under a microscope, rocky landscapes, networks of fibrous forms, flashes of light. By employing this developed painting technique, I feel as though I am almost exploring an unknown, alien planet—one that is as beautiful and fascinating as it is mysterious and inaccessible. I want to discover ever more distant recesses of this reality.
The result of these explorations is a series of several medium-format paintings. The method of their creation is based on my own original approach, which I describe as the “archaeological method.”
