Jakub Matusewicz
Am I making this up? No, I’m just remembering
Potentiality, vitality, original vision, playfulness, and authenticity – artists have plenty to gain when they liken their modus faciendi to the actions of a child.
While it is impossible to become childlike, ‘simple’, or ‘primal’ on a whim, Jakub Matusewicz applies his enthusiasm and childlike curiosity in order to create sophisticated, complex paintings (oil on canvas) that convey a multifaceted message.
Variously shaped and colourful images are scattered throughout the exhibition and resemble a puzzle — or a kind of distraction? — adorning U-jazdowski’s space. In the midst of this space, children play hide and seek. They hide behind the canvasses and jump on a trampoline. The kids are bursting with energy, but so are the paintings — the canvases appear to submit to this playfulness. The resulting deconstruction is in fact a composition consisting of fragments of the artist’s memories and associations with his own childhood.
Matusewicz supplements his childhood memories and formal experiments with ideas from the field of psychology. These mainly relate to the subject of vision and perception – i.e, how parents perceive their children, how children see their parents and, finally, how children see themselves. Matusewicz believes that his identity was formed when he developed, as a child, a sense of conscious perception. The paintings presented at the exhibition are also inspired by the work of 20th-century artists including Witkacy, Andrzej Wróblewski, and Jan Berdyszak.
Matusewicz honours the memory of the past. He depicts a concluded period of his life through images that remain alive in his memory or in photographs. The exhibition features numerous autobiographical themes, but there is no self-portrait. In several paintings, however, we can recognize the image of the artist’s twin brother. As in Edward Elgar’s celebrated musical work Enigma, Matusewicz’s paintings relate to themes and emotions from his own life, and to this end, they portray his loved ones. Not unlike Enigma, the exhibition resembles a kind of cryptogram and presents much more than we, the viewers, can comprehend. Matusewicz takes us on an introspective journey and invites us to play a game of perception. What will we be able to see? The reconstruction of certain childhood scenes and portraits of his friends’ offspring are used to depict the figure of the child in its archetypal sense, or as understood by Carl Gustav Jung, as a form of collective unconscious and a model of the drive for self-realization. For Matusewicz, the figure of the child is a metaphor, a carrier of meanings, and the narrative arch of the show. We can turn towards the unconscious when we look into a mirror or stare at rippling water – these motifs are also to be found in the kaleidoscope created from polygonal images presented at the exhibition.
