KHRYSTYNA_JALOWA
- KHRYSTYNA_JALOWA
Irrlicht
Artist: Michał Zawada
Krakauer Haus
Hintere Insel Schütt 34
Nuremberg
14.10.–24.11.2023
Photo: Katarzyna Prusik-Lutz
Sometimes a flame suddenly appears above the surface of the water in marshes, swamps or quagmires. It illuminates the darkness, becoming a signpost for stray wanderers. In folk beliefs, this errant flame was identified with the damned souls of suicides or drowned people who could not find peace. They wandered around the world, appearing in the form of fire and deceiving lost people who, following the light, were themselves drawn into the treacherous waters of the marshes.
The errant fireflies were both fascinating in their unexpected appearance above the surface of the water, but also frightening, as they were associated with unclean forces and danger.
Michał Zawada uses the motif of the errant firefly to take us on a journey through his art. Together with the light of the campfire, we travel through the world created by the artist and try to answer the questions that arise in his work.
The landscapes that form the backdrop to his rearrangements are reminiscent of the Romantic tradition of landscape painting. It revealed not only the moods and emotional or spiritual states of a person, but also how he created a vision of nature: untamed, wild, impenetrable, standing in opposition to civilisation/culture and the world order created by it.
The artist perversely asks what nature actually is, if not the de facto product of man’s vision. It is he who defined nature and then shaped it according to his own image. Nature, which we both admire and cherish, is also a power that we cannot tame, which makes us fear and feel threatened. We try to subjugate and control it, even though it constantly eludes our expectations and reminds us how little influence we have over it.
The light of the fire leads us further, in order to bring us to another force: fire, with its destructive power, consuming everything it meets in its path. Fire consuming the earth, nature, spewing forth from within the volcano in the form of liquid lava. A fire that is a total destruction, but which heralds a cleansing and from which a new beginning is born. A revolution that will bring change and a new order. A promise of a better tomorrow.
Fire is also that great sphere floating in our galaxy around which our planet revolves. The sun giving life and energy, setting the rhythm of the day and thus the passage of time. It is also a natural signpost, marking the directions of the world. If we look up at night, we see the moon, a satellite of the Earth, shining with the reflected light of the sun. We also see falling comets, which announce the arrival of change, usually some kind of misfortune, but also stars whose radiance has reached us, even though they have long ceased to exist. Confronting the space of the sky is an attempt to confront a dimension that is unattainable for us, so unattainable that we can only think of it in terms of imagination. What if we experience multiple sunsets at once? Are there such universes and such dimensions of our reality in which this is possible? Or perhaps it doesn’t have to be at all and all we need to do is exercise our imagination.
Surreal elements appear in Michał Zawada’s paintings, such as hands that are not part of any particular body. They express opposition, resistance and the power of the individual against the world in which he or she functions and which cannot be subjugated, or the striving for a different, but not necessarily better, tomorrow.
The exhibition ‚Irrlicht’ is a wandering after a misfire that leads us through time, dimensions, space: those real, those imagined or fully abstract. It is a journey from the depths of the earth to outer space. Both equally unreachable, by which we can only imagine them.