Piotr Bosacki – Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art

The Issue is Being Handled is the most sweeping exhibition in the career of Piotr Bosacki – an artist who has earned a reputation as one of the most fascinating and original creative personalities of the 30’s generation.

Bosacki composes his exhibition at the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art with premiere implementations and a selection of newly developed projects. The collection consists of animated films, musical apparatuses of the artist’s own invention, machines that produce images and sounds, as well as spaces designed to arouse a sensual experience. All these works comprise of a unique instrumentation, which Bosacki employs to examine the nature of things. The exhibition is not so much a show of works and objects of art, as it is a laboratory, wherein the artist initiates a sequence of processes adhering to the scientific method. In the results of these experiments, Bosacki is searching for both knowledge and a poetic moment, which he yearns to share with the public.

The interests of Piotr Bosacki are stretched from abstract systems such as music and mathematics, to the concreteness of words and narrative. The artist's fascinations were expressed through musical performances, experimental compositions, and unconventional instruments. Above all, however, they were fulfilled through animated films. The artist brings the most ordinary materials of everyday life to the workshops in the animated films. Typical examples of such materials are string, paper, cardboard, rubber band, home appliances, a picture drawn with a pen on checkered paper – these and similarly modest, simple props are enough for Bosacki to create models of reality. The animation artist sets these models in motion to study various aspects of the mechanics of the world and watch them shake immersed in the world of the human spirit. In some of the films, Bosacki personally explained his images. The author's voice came from off-screen; the artist played the role of the narrator, lecturer, raconteur, and was aware of the inquiries. In the work of Bosacki, the artistic practice is largely identical to practicing philosophy. The artist, therefore, philosophises; but even when his considerations start to overflow with imposing abstractions and he touches upon the subtlest of spiritual issues, he does not allow himself to leave the territory of everyday, anecdotes taken from life, or colloquial language. In Bosacki’s art, colloquial speech becomes yet another pliable material, which the artist – a bracing poet – uses with outstanding skill and daring sense of humor.

In the exhibition The Issue is Being Handled, Bosacki – otherwise known as a poet and a brilliant raconteur – is silent. He refrains from telling stories, allowing for the works, amongst which several premiere sound installations can be found, to speak for themselves. The conceptual frame of the project is a series of films completed in 2014 and entitled Die Kunst der Animation. Each of the works from this series is a study of the action of ‘a kind of’ artistic machine programmed to conduct certain processes. Bosacki only initiates these processes, but does not control them; once set in motion, the "art machine" produces the image and the meaning by itself.

In the project The Issue is Being Handled, more than ever before in Bosacki’s work, the figure of the artist becomes identical to the figure of a natural philosopher. In his attitude, Bosacki recalls modern scholars such as Robert Fludd and Emanuel Swedenborg, seeking analogies between the spiritual worlds and the matter on the micro and macro scale. What plays an important role in the inquiries of Bosacki, as in the preceding historical searches, is, on the one hand, the Kabbalistic belief in the number, measure, and permutation as a tool enabling access to the heart of the matter; on the other hand, as an equally deep trust in the metaphor and poetic imagination as an instrument by which we can transgress the cognitive limitations of empirical science.

In the exhibition The Issue is Being Handled, Bosacki is putting to work dust, noise, electricity, as well as destruction mechanisms, such as dissolving and softening. These elements and processes are difficult to control, and, therefore, the artist is not trying to fully control them. This does not mean, however, that he is leaving his art to chance. It is appropriate to say that in the cosmology of Bosacki, chance does not really exist. It’s a cosmology based on the belief that the physical world has sense, its own wisdom and spirit, seeking to establish a certain order. Chance –in both art and science – is just one of many ways to recognise that order. One should allow for things to happen, and watch them carefully when The Issue is Being Handled.

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  • Stach Szabłowski