fix this pothook of beauty on this palette

you never know it might be final

Samuel Beckett, Serena III

Andrzej Siwkiewicz, a Polish artist living in upstate New York, has been painting for the past few years in a style of figurative abstraction. His work is connected to a sensibility in Polish Modernism that is coincident with the Neo-Expressionists in Western Europe and the United States.

Over the past three years, Siwkiewicz’s representation of the figure has been in a perpetual state of a dissemblance. One is more apt to see the paintings as an abstract field where biomorphic and geometric shapes interact and collide against one another In fact, these shapes are visceral signifiers that constantly refer back to the human figure.

In 1992, Siwkiewicz was working with two primary themes: bowls and figures. (Earlier he had been painting the human figure and bowls in the same composition.) Using a stylistic means of interpretation, the artist began seeking an object-to-ground relationship. In the paintings of bowls the elliptical shapes hover against a spatial field, as in (Big) Bowls on Yellow, Red, and Blue; while the paintings of abstract figures are more elongated and, in some cases, divided, as in Split 1993). These paintings are essentially metaphysical in their orientation. They have a certain refinement and symbolic content.

The expressive point of view changed in Siwkiewicz’s paintings in late 1993 as the visual structure of the surface began to explode into a dense configuration of color and shape. Taking on the tragic character of Greek drama, paintings such as Groinkickers and Groins (Beheaded) reveal a certain overdetermination whereby the ego projects itself into the dark chaos of metaphysical abstraction.

These paintings offer a fragmented metaphor of the body in an arbitrary psychic space. The formal relationships between the pictorial elements are tightly bound to the surface, thereby offering a tension between the elements that elicits a vision of inner-chaos, a turbulence that is inexorable and unmistakable in its coercion. The picture plane is thus destroyed as a purely conceptual structure. The dissemblance of the body as a psychic projection takes over and crowds the space, conflating the logic of both mind and body. The pictorial field is transformed into a symbolic nexus of thrusts and counter-thrusts building a composition that is indeterminate, yet aggressively defined.

Like the painter Hans Hofmann, Siwkiewicz pays attention to the construction of the surface, the formal continuity of the shapes, the complexity of form in relation to the space. In contrast to Hofmann, the recent paintings of Siwkiewicz appear less resolved in a theoretical manner and more open to what might be considered as a metaphorical resonance.

The splaying of the figure as a discharge of psychic oppression suggests an action that is given to repetition, a form of visual aggressivity. In a painting, such as Stranglers (1994), one is unlikely to find a resolution in the conventional sense. Rather the viewer is more likely to be confronted and provoked by the artist’s visualization of unconscious violence.

The painterly aspect of these works describes the process of the artist’s thought; yet the thought behind or within this process is not exempt from involvement. The visceral impact in the recent work of Siwkiewicz is the issue at large. To receive the thought behind these paintings is to empathize with the artist’s struggle in securing a sense of one’s cultural identity in an increasingly abstract world.  

Robert C. Morgan 1995