Jolanta Ciesielska "Memory Cards"

The first images from the "Memory Cards" series Witek Ziemiszewski painted in March of 2010: The spring has come. The snow has melted revealing the naked brown soil and the constant rains have provoked him to paint a picture that is dominated by the water of spring time. The painting "Rain" is born - a perverse abstract landscape with no data, a canvas occupied by streams of water pouring down from heaven. The only green and compact reference point is visible through a fragment of a window - a wintergreen hedge growing in the garden. The known view, observed whilst having morning coffee, is reflected in the next canvas of the artist - "Window". And from these numerous encounters, with the sight of the water as a form of relaxation, it is not surprising that it is this element that soon becomes a ferment, inspiring the next compositions in Ziemiszewski's work.In the late spring and the summer of 2010 he created other works around this topic: "Swimming Pool", "Marine", "On The Water"and "Under." The last of these images deserves special attention. Transparency covers the canvas very aptly put to represent the clear and infinite depths of the North Sea, the Baltic Sea, in which the artist recalls diving experiences that accompanied him there, submerged in the marine depths. This view is the moment when his awareness was suspended on the level of memory and perception. It is perhaps the last earthly view, just before the final decision of being immersed in the endless depths of water, subjected to another world. An environment in which man is merely an intruder and perhaps a curious guy who belongs to the creatures of a different metabolism. There exists contemplative silence coupled with total submission to another way of seeing and feeling of the familiar parameters of materiality, the density of the body. With each metre down there is a completely different perception of color and of sound, there are unusual feelings about the relationship of self-experiencing your own body - finding yourself in an environment in which the murmur of blood flowing, breath and the heart beating are the only audible sounds that make the time spent underwater a kind of yoga, the moment of accumualting dispersed energy, a way to re-emerge the body and analyzing it to the mind - confessed the artist. These emotions encoded in his memory paintings await their brushstrokes, they belong to a yet to be painted series of the inarticulate which, judging from Ziemiszewski's ambitious approach towards all extreme and unusual challenges, will eventually be taken up as the subject of his paintings. The artist's great passion and his way of breaking away from the commercial world, overloaded with absorbing games which aim at the problems of production and sale of various items, is travelling and the discovery of new places, views and cultures. For several years Ziemiszewski has traversed the wildernesses of Europe and The Far-East - reaching Siberia, Mongolia, Iceland, the ends of the Carpathian mountains and the Altai Mountains, always armed with a camera. Apart from many impressions and direct experiences of travel, innumerable views, landscapes, photos, events and situations remain in his mind and in the memory of his digital camera. A spinning wheels theme appears in the paintings, complemented by the energy of a rising sun motif, the essence of following the road "without a purpose." A characteristic feature, a motif, exhibited in this series of Ziemiszewski's paintings is several gigabites of memory card, included as an integral compositional element denoting the accumulated energy of memories of places wandered by the artist over the globe. After some time, the data stored on them become a pretext to create a sequence of images in which the artist reproduces the essence of colors, structures and aura of destinations. Deprived of the precise location, which is hidden in his "safe storage" context, meaning a trip, they offer the viewer purely pictorial qualities of perception and color-shape structure is stored and processed by the artist's experience of the energy element (earth, stone and fire). A unique and sensitively filtered through painting is created, an aura of a particular location. Just look at his paintings: "A Bamboo Grove" or "River Bed", which contain the memorized view of the dry, stony Moroccan river. Through the generalization and abstraction in Ziemiszewski's paintings fragmentized slices of nature are brought to view to be processed onto the canvas as landscape structures referring to the tradition of hot abstraction (most evident in "Fire" and in the painting "Rain"). Yet they retain a subtle balance between what the mind dictates and what the means to emotions are experienced at the time. Like the works of Witold Leon Tarasewicz, Ziemiszewski's paintings are rarely undertaken by contemporary Polish painters, that is the modern interpreted landscape. The components building up this type of painting are both direct experienced sights visited during his many travels and findings of the appropriate mixtures of form, texture, light and color an intellectual operation of stored memory card projection. Without the creative effort of the artist, they would remain merely a collection of anonymous electronic views satisfying our eyes with a longing for clean nature, unpolluted by commercialism and industry, in which human life is subject to different laws relying on blind chance.

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