Heavenly chaos.
Borysław Czyżak
Sebastian Gierz's painting attracts and hypnotizes. From a distance, we see a network of freely arranged blue lines that resemble nothing we have seen before; it is a new world in itself. The eye wanders across the surface, following the curves drawn by the painter's hand, stopping at the densifications that seem like focal points. The lines are very different – some are solid, strongly marked, leading us along their path decisively, not allowing the gaze to escape in another direction. Others are delicate, marked with finesse, as if they were just densifications of air. There are also freely thrown spots that hold our gaze for longer. We are drawn into the chaos of changing directions and shapes, constantly discovering new constellations of forms. In this chaotic wandering, there is only one organizing element that acts as an anchor, keeping us in the real being and not allowing us to completely immerse in the hypnotic space: this anchor is the vertical axis of symmetry, dividing the two parts of the painting. The work is a diptych, consisting of two almost perfectly symmetrical parts, with the gap between the two canvases being the axis of symmetry that allows us to maintain orientation. The longer we keep our gaze on the axis of symmetry, the more associations of different shapes come to us, which our consciousness begins to read on the painting – just like in Rorschach tests, where the viewer starts to recognize familiar shapes of animals, plants, cosmic spaces, genitals, or familiar figures in seemingly shapeless spots. This recognition of shapes in Sebastian Gierz's painting becomes more pronounced when we fix our gaze near the axis of symmetry. When we direct our attention to the center of either of the two canvases or near their outer edges, it is as if we regain the freedom of free flight, freeing ourselves from the figurative associations imposed by our subconscious and culture, and we can indulge in an unrestrained journey.
Our perception of an image changes with distance. When we look from afar, we see a plane filled with lines and spots of varying widths and shapes, we pick out dominant "paths" – such as the one placed near the golden ratio in relation to height, symmetrical concerning the gap between the images, a delicate line forming two stretched crescents, or a rounded letter "w". As we get closer to the image, our gaze delves into the tangled paths, succumbing to the impression of three-dimensionality, where thinner lines seem farther away, and those more pronounced along with distinct spots come to the forefront. The closer we are, the more the impression of traveling through space extending in all directions intensifies. This impression is further heightened when we focus our gaze on areas distant from the axis of symmetry.The impression of the third dimension is surprising because the artist deliberately does not use any nuance of value, that is, color saturation. The blue is the same everywhere – matte, uniform, with no brush marks, no change in intensity that usually occurs in Chinese calligraphy when the brush is stopped. The lines and spots are perfectly uniform in color, differing only in width. And as it turns out, this is enough to create in our imagination the impression of traveling through three-dimensional space.The issue of representing three-dimensional space on the plane of an image is as old as humanity itself, suffice it to recall cave paintings, delicate Chinese landscapes with clearly marked aerial perspective, the works of Renaissance painters with linear perspective and ethereal sfumato, Cezanne's shifting perspective. In the 20th century, El Lissitzky, fascinated by Lobachevsky's non-Euclidean geometry and the discoveries of the theory of relativity, instead of reducing space and "pinning" it to the plane of the image, used isometric transformations and sought infinity in the nuance of color value. He relied on the fact that two planes of the same color, differing in saturation, seem distant from us to varying degrees. The "paler" plane appears farther from the viewer than the surface with greater color intensity. In this way, according to El Lissitzky, we touch the mystery of the infinity of space – when we assign a zero position to the plane of the image, an infinite space stretches into and in front of the image, reflected by color saturation, with this space being "irrational", impossible to measure by physical methods, extending in our imagination. Meanwhile, Sebastian Gierz goes in the opposite direction, arguing in his work with El Lissitzky's considerations: it is not the color saturation, but the pure shape that stimulates our imagination to travel in three dimensions. What is wider and more clearly marked seems closer to the viewer, what is delicate becomes ethereal and distant, with exactly the same color saturation.The artist's choice of color – ultramarine – is also significant. It affects us from the first glance, we are accustomed to the ultramarine colors obtained from cobalt in underglaze decoration on Persian ceramics and Chinese porcelain, later replicated in Delft and Meissen, at first glance we read Sebastian Gierz's image as an ornament – because it can remind us of the ornament of Dutch or Persian tiles. But it is not an ornament, it is too far from repetitiveness. The connection of ultramarine with European culture comes to mind – this type of blue was the most precious painting pigment of the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Baroque. Lapis lazuli, a mineral from outside Europe that was the base of the blue pigment (hence the name ultramarine – overseas), was so expensive that it was used only in the most important parts of the image, painting the robes of Mary or the garments of Jesus. Moreover, it was not just a matter of price – blue well represents the heavenly nature of the figures, not only in European tradition, Buddha was and is often depicted using this color, as heavenly and incorporeal. In non-religious depictions, it was masterfully used by Vermeer, who, according to legend, fell into debt precisely because of the high price of lapis lazuli. It was not until the mid-19th century that the French government announced a competition to develop a method for producing synthetic ultramarine, won by the Lyon chemist Jean-Baptiste Guimet, and since then creators have had free access to the heavenly pigment. And Sebastian Gierz's choice of color, not accidental, introduces us to a dialogue with a great tradition reaching back to ancient Persia, China, medieval and Renaissance painting.There is another direction in which the artist guides us in his erudite dialogue with tradition, simultaneously breaking further barriers – it is symmetry. In Sebastian Gierz's works, symmetry is striking, as in the kouroi figures from the archaic Greek period. The statues of young men smile with an absent, heavenly smile, their body's symmetry is perfect and has no counterpart in nature. The artists of that time did not seek a perfect reflection of human anatomical features and our imperfections, they sought a heavenly absolute. Although today we do not know for sure to what extent the static nature and restraint of expression of the kouroi were a deliberate convention, and to what extent they resulted from workshop limitations – from our today's perspective, their symmetry seems unearthly and carries with it all the associated symbolic load. For centuries, artists and scholars have dealt with symmetry concerning proportion and harmony, often finding Pythagorean analogies between music, architecture, and visual arts. The view has been adopted that mirror symmetry leads to static, orderly representations, and deviations from it introduce dynamics and tension into the image and sculpture. In the Renaissance, not only were the proportions of the body, buildings, and the search for harmony in the image dealt with, referring to the ancients, but also these considerations were combined with medieval symbolism – and then new tension appeared between form and symbolism. An example of such tension is an image with striking symmetry – the Coronation of the Virgin by the French painter Enguerrand Quarton (1454). Finesse and elegance combine with symbolism – the Father and Son crowning Mary are identical, like mirror reflections, which of course has theological justification, but is also a striking example of symmetry taken to the limits of possibility. Such symmetry does not occur in nature, it is supernatural.
Looking at the contemporary painting by Sebastian Gierz, I cannot free myself from these cultural associations – ultramarine in my imagination is linked with the tradition of depicting heavenly figures, symmetry is on one hand a search for harmony, but on the other, when taken to the extreme, it has something unearthly about it. Another analogy appears when I look at the paintings of Quarton and Gierz – it is the shape of the rounded letter "w" appearing near the golden section of the canvas. In Gierz's work, it is a subtle line of two extended crescent-like shapes, in Quarton's, it is the blue of Mary's widely spread cloak. I cannot free myself from this association, although it was probably not planned by the artist. But it is an example of how an image in the viewer's imagination begins to live its own life and evoke cultural associations not necessarily foreseen by the painter.In contemporary art, besides Sebastian Gierz, there are also other artists who express their explorations in the study of symmetry in an extremely intriguing way. Among them is Alicja Kwade, a Polish-German artist living and working in Berlin. In her works, shown among others at the Metropolitan Museum in New York (2019), Place Vendome in Paris (2022), the Pompidou Center, and the Venice Biennale (2017), we can trace the crossing of barriers of time, space, and gravity, established associations and habits. Mirror reflections, parallel worlds, opening new spaces – this is Alicja Kwade's element – and in her solutions, she often reaches for unsettling symmetry solutions. In her work "Nissan (Parallelwelt 1+2)" from 2009, she presented two Nissan Micra cars, life-sized physical objects, being exact mirror reflections of each other. Even the scratches and dents resulting from use were exactly in the place corresponding to the mirror reflection. The work affects not only our intellect, inspiring considerations about parallel worlds, but also our senses and subconscious – suddenly we find ourselves in two worlds simultaneously, on this and the other side of the mirror, without crossing anywhere and without interrupting the continuity of our "self". And at the same time, when we focus our gaze on just one car, the whole paradox disappears, we are in only one world, nothing disturbs or amazes us. But as soon as we disperse our attention, the existence of the second, mirrored, alternative world immediately makes itself known. Similarly, symmetry works in Sebastian Gierz's paintings – when we are close to the painting and focus on just one part of it, we are in a conventional world, interesting in terms of form and craftsmanship, but not evoking deeper emotions or reflections. But as soon as we look at the two reflections simultaneously, the play of imagination begins, which is hard to stop.The symmetry in Sebastian Gierz's work is not perfect, however. The mirror reflection along the vertical axis is not ideal. Some lines and spots are clear on the left side, while on the right they are somewhat blurred, as if they were an unclear reflection. But it can also be the other way around – other lines are perfectly clear on the right side, and imperfect on the left. Besides the chaos of lines and spots introduced by their shapes, we also have chaos resulting from the imperfection of the reflection. And we do not know what is the original side and what is its reflection – both are simultaneously reality and its reflection, in different places seemingly swapping roles. The Platonic cave, that is, reality and its reflection, entangled with itself, in different fragments transitioning into itself or its own reflection. Such a double chaos – of the original shape and its unpredictable reflection – must be unsettling.
Humanity has feared chance and chaos since the dawn of time. The answer to unpredictability was religion – the search for a higher meaning, a hidden plan of the Creator or Guardians, which was supposed to give meaning to events and misfortunes, or bring a reward in the form of peace, liberation from chaos. Since the Enlightenment, the hope for liberation from chaos – or at least its acceptance – was supposed to be brought by reason and civilization, although sometimes they wandered towards utopias and totalitarianisms. As Zygmunt Bauman, a Polish philosopher working in Leeds, writes, art was also one of the areas of human struggle with chaos. The awareness of the transience and randomness of life led to the creation of lasting forms, pretending to immortality. But we can add: art in the 20th century, crossing many previously uncrossable barriers, also crossed the imperative of durability – after all, the sculptures of Eva Hesse made of inherently impermanent materials were subject to degradation, it was decay and impermanence that became their integral property. So – they showed acceptance of decay and chaos. Even earlier, in the 1930s, Alexander Calder inscribed chaos and chance into the operation of his mobile sculptures. Suspended in space, light forms moved by the slightest air vibrations move chaotically, as if subjected to the butterfly effect – even a gentle air movement caused by the viewer causes significant changes in the trajectory of the entire system's movement. Here too, we have acceptance of chance and chaos, instead of escaping from it, which was the basis of art for centuries, because after all, the search for harmony in Pythagorean sounds, rhythms, figures, and numbers, the search for proportions was nothing but an attempt to order the world, an escape from chaos and unpredictability. Meanwhile, in the 20th century, Alexander Calder introduces randomness as a program of his art – and yet, when we look at the slow dance of his mobile sculptures, it is beautiful and harmonious for us, although so far from Pythagorean predictability. All this – the chance of hand movement, the unpredictability of individual spots' formation, the imperfection of symmetry, we also have in the contemporary works of Sebastian Gierz, who in his own, original way interprets acceptance or rejection of chaos. One thing is undoubtedly new in his art – he simultaneously creates and orders chaos with the help of the vertical axis of symmetry, and the viewer's impressions vary depending on the distance from which we look and the place we focus our gaze. It is the viewer who participates in creating or ordering chaos. All this would not be possible without the creator's many years of work on his craft. How to create a smooth, matte, saturated painting matter without visible brush marks? Sebastian Gierz does not want his paintings to be calligraphies, where the brush mark left by the artist's hand is an additional sign. In calligraphy, where the brush stops or increases pressure, the color intensity increases – and Gierz wants a uniform and smooth color, it is the shape that should absorb the viewer, not the color changes and brush marks. So, he applies paint slowly dripping from a stick, stopping in places to get a wider spot. The painting created in this way is a pure record of the process over time. It is not the pressure of the brush that determines the width of the spot or line, but the speed of hand movement. To achieve the desired effect, years of experiments with paint saturation with pigments and its viscosity were needed. The obtained matte, uniform color is pure, neutral, it does not introduce any additional disturbances in our perception of the shape. And at the same time – it is after all heavenly ultramarine, the choice of color is not accidental, it is a dialogue with the entire centuries-old tradition of art – European and non-European.
And how is symmetry created in this workshop? Everything here has a multi-layered meaning – the process of creation, symbolism, cultural references. The artist lays two identical canvases on the floor, creating his lines and spots in a manner close to writing or automatic drawing, trying to free his mind and hand – as he says, it took him many years to "free" himself from what he learned at the Academy. The automatism of the hand, close to the surrealists, brings additional meanings here. Equally important is the fact that the artist works on two paintings simultaneously, applying successive lines to the surface, which are far from symmetrical – each of the two paintings is its own unique world. And at a certain moment, an act of "collapse" occurs – two independent worlds merge into one, though only to a certain extent. When the paint is still fresh, the two paintings are lifted to a vertical position and brought into contact with their painted surfaces. The pattern of each surface is imprinted on the adjacent one. We can only imagine how much time Sebastian Gierz spent achieving the right paint viscosity, the pressure at the contact of the two surfaces, the time the two paintings spend together, touching with their fresh surfaces. Two paintings are created, each of which is an original and each is a print, the artist combines painting and graphics into one medium, drawing attention to the essence of the process in which he creates two separate worlds, brings them to a collapse in their approach, then separates them, but they still form an inseparable, complementary pair. The print is imperfect – some lines are imprinted weaker, others stronger. When we look closely, we can trace which line or spot was "originally" on which part of the diptych. The symmetry is striking, but it is not perfect – although you have to look closely to see it. We have chaos in many dimensions – the unpredictability of paint flow, the impossible-to-control formation of spreading spots, the uncertain hand movement at times, which cannot be corrected, the imperfection of the print. And finally, the chaos of the shapes themselves, in which it is difficult to see repetition or rhythm forming any order. And the axis of symmetry, separating the two twin paintings, acting like a mirror, is in our eyes the only certain, seemingly tangible element that organizes the entire arrangement – although it is only an immaterial gap between the paintings, air. It is up to the viewer whether to submit to the dictate of the axis of symmetry, seeking order, or to seek a free journey through the spaces of chaos, moving the gaze away from the axis connecting the two paintings and delving into spaces increasingly distant from it.Can such ambiguity and diversity be created by other means than the workshop method developed over the years? Can contemporary art created by humans be replaced by works created with the help of artificial intelligence? We have two possibilities here – either we are talking about "art" created by artificial intelligence from start to finish, thus inspired and created by the system independently, or we mean works produced with the help of self-learning algorithms, but under human direction.
For centuries, the debate has been ongoing about what is art and what is not – once the criteria concerned beauty and harmony, craftsmanship proficiency, over time the narrative and conveyed content became increasingly important. It is often said about the necessity of making hundreds and thousands of decisions by the artist in the act of creation, it is also said about the human right to error and imperfection as a measure of art – as opposed to mechanically or informatically produced seemingly perfect works. Of course, increasingly perfect, self-learning algorithms can probably replace us in making thousands of decisions, over time they can also master the workshop – even if these are subtle brush movements in the hand of a robot, increasingly close to the capabilities of the human hand over the years. Imperfection and error can be introduced into such works – by imposing random deviations or "errors" in a stochastic manner. Will such a work be "distinguishable" at first glance from works created by humans? Over time, the methods of production will probably develop so much that in terms of pure craftsmanship, the distinction may be difficult. However, it is not the method of production – even with random errors – that is important. What is important is that art is created through human experiences – the artist translates his life into his work, leaves traces of struggling with the reality of the world and art, breaks through the resistance of the self and matter. And this contact between the author and the recipient is the essence of the matter, which cannot be simply replaced.However, one can imagine that the artist works with artificial intelligence algorithms, somehow "directing" the machine, creating successive iterations with its help until he achieves the expressive power that conveys his intentions, and maybe even surprises himself. But many months of the artist's work with the machine – that is still human work. Artificial intelligence then becomes just another medium and tool – just as chemical reagents used for laboriously developing photographs are tools. But it is the artist who is then the creator and the first judge – and the next co-creator is the imagination of the recipient. Similarly, in the case of art created by Sebastian Gierz – his art is created with the help of a workshop method developed over the years, humanly imperfect, but in its own way moving. We remember the creator's effort, as a result of which works of exceptional density and ambiguity are created, evoking unexpected associations in the viewer, both emotional and erudite – and this distinguishes this world from even the most perfect artificial intelligence.Sebastian Gierz introduces us to a space that is different every day – because looking at his painting every day, we bring the experience of subsequent days into our gaze, fatigue, tension, or calmness. Our gaze wanders quickly or slowly, at different moments stopping at different points of focus. Sometimes we recognize seemingly familiar shapes, sometimes we just follow successive, abstract lines. Every day the light is different, and our attitude is different – this is a journey that is only possible with art deeply experienced and worked out by the artist.
At the same time, one must appreciate the courage of the painter who can go his own way. In times when narratives referring to current events and problems are important in art, when artists struggle with the reality of this world and attempt to fix it, when the same journalistic topics are "processed" simultaneously in various dimensions – by the media, visual arts, social portals, and literature, we are subjected to an excess of stimuli. And at this time, an artist comes who creates his own world. In a completely individual, original way, he conducts a dialogue with the tradition of art, simultaneously crossing successive barriers – of chaos, order, copy and original, perfection and imperfection. And he introduces us to a valuable state of contemplation, which is hard to forget.
2024
about the author
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Borysław Czyżak
Borysław Czyżak is the author of the book
"Collection. Stories about contemporary Polish art," Marginesy Publishing House 2024.
He completed postgraduate studies in modern art history at the Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences.
He has published, among others, in the magazine "Art."
His original education is in physics.