Excerpt taken from the Inner City exhibition catalogue (Schody Gallery, 2009)
The idea of a city – a space created and arranged by a man according to the laws he has established and the space, which deliberately functions in opposition to the chaotic forces of nature – is a testimony to the human yearning for a transcendent order of things. However, the vital force of the entities brought into existence has exceeded the expectations of their creators. The contemporary city expands, consumes spaces and, at the same time, leads to their decay. It takes the forms as chaotic as the nature it degrades, in a way becoming yet another creation, subject to the laws of development, expansion and death. For a modern human being, urban space seems to be the natural environment of most of his/her activities and experiences. The changing images outside the window of a bus or an underground car, stretches of hypermarkets, traffic routes – these surroundings are hardly registered by our consciousness, making them peculiar “non-places of hyper-modernity”, as Marc Auge calls them.
These very spaces are brought back to us in Michał Nowak’s paintings. For several years now, they have been one of the fundamental motifs of his paintings. However, the artist is not concerned with portraying the back alleys of contemporary cities. We won’t find sentimental views or dramatic images appealing to the aesthetic sensibility of the viewer in his works. The paintings’ themes usually oscillate around a number of concepts, mostly focusing on two areas: painting solution of the picture plane and noticing and pointing out the inconsistencies of the reality we live in but which we often tend to ignore. Distinctive formal features of Michał Nowak’s painting include virtuosic compositional solutions and bold and fully conscious use of colour. But viewers can find much more than these aesthetic values in his works. In unified industrial spaces, devoid of individual identification, people appear, and that gives the whole painting an entirely different meaning. Movement creeps into the stable structure, a clearly defined shape turns up in an open space, telling the viewer to define his/her place in the encounter with the reality described by the artist. Blending of time and space categories is one of modernity’s characteristic phenomena. “In 10 minutes” sounds to us more or less the same as “in 5 kilometres”. “Over there” may mean almost the same thing as “in the past”, whereas “here” is almost synonymous with “now”. For our own use, we try to tame both time and space, which are slipping away from us. We also try to tame our own ‘being’ in time and space in order to find the answer to the question of who we actually are. This process of building the space of one’s own consciousness and identity is one of the themes closely related to the artist’s searching. Only by knowing something about ourselves can we find anything in the world – and in the image of the world. The places in Michał Nowak’s paintings are in fact places within us, often the ones we might not have noticed by ourselves. They reflect the consciousness of the artist, but also the consciousness of the viewer, who is now able to discover a vast, pure and fascinating space of a new experience.
Ewa Herniczek
