Paper and the existence of the Universe
Andrzej Prokopiuk’s creative activity is a unique phenomenon. When confronted with today’s kaleidoscopic flicker of images and faced with the contemporary, overcoloured, noisy, artificially convulsing pop-reality, the artistic approach of the artist from Inowrocław really stands out. Through a very ascetic form, resembling a practising monk-artist, he consciously and by choice turns away from the temporal exterior of the world in his search for what is universal, spiritual, infinite and absolute. When asked what is the essence of being that he stands for, he points to a hidden, ideal, everlasting order. To express his own message, he chooses difficult forms – a purely visual ontology. Vertical rectangles of his works which are made of paper matter are arranged into horizontal strip-like entities. They resemble traditional Japanese vertical scrolls kakemono and horizontal scrolls makimono or, looking for a much closer parallel, the flat wide planes of white and black soil of the Kujawy region, raised vertically. Whiteness and blackness symbolise the artist’s perception of: lightness and darkness; a heavy, satiated, earthly materiality; the lightness of transparent and transcendent emotions; claritas and tenebris.
Between these two extreme values of tone is included an abundance of subtle tonalities which may be captured only by the most trained eye and brain. Particular attention should be paid to the material from which these works are made. At the very beginning it is a powdery organic matter obtained by the laborious, meticulous breaking down of natural elements by the artist’s hands. Then, this materia prima is combined with ‘waters of creation’ to become a semi-fluid paste which ‘on the seventh day’, once it has dried up, is delicately transformed by the artist using his hands and based on his thoughts to bring it into being. This process of coming into being, which has a demiurgic-ritual character, is as important as the final effect, the process of choosing and weighing the component elements, their number and proportion (or effectively putting them into codes), as well as the qualities of the surface and the texture, mean that although the artistic means of expression have been significantly reduced, yet the number of possible interpretations and contexts which give meaning to the works is not diminished. Robert Morris, one of the leading representatives of minimal art, wrote “Simplicity of shape does not necessarily equate with simplicity of experience”. And this is really so.
The calm, clean, monumental hieratism of these impersonal, super-individual creations (which look as if they were not made by a human hand) allows one’s imagination to reach out freely and without constraint and to read the invisible texts that are written on the huge pages of the artist’s Ontic Book:
ABOUT THE SNOW-WHITENESS OF “PANIS DEI”
ABOUT THE TRANSPARENT FRAGILITY OF THE CHRISTMAS EVE WAFER
ABOUT THE WHITENESS OF THE STARCHED TABLECLOTH
ABOUT THE BRIGHTNESS OF FABRICS WHITENED IN THE SUN
ABOUT THE YELLOW-WHITE TRANSPARENCY OF WAX
ABOUT THE TARNISHED CRYSTAL OF ICE SHEETS AND SNOW LAYERS
ABOUT THE WARM GREY ROUGHNESS OF FELT
ABOUT THE SILVER-GREY GENTLENESS OF A NEST OF INSECTS
ABOUT THE POROSITY OF DARK AND BRIGHT TISSUE PAPERS – FILTERS ABSORBING THE DIRT OF THE WORLD
ABOUT THE SENSUALITY OF PARCHMENT
ABOUT THE BRIGHTNESS OF WINGS OF BIRDS AND ANGELS
ABOUT THE CHARM OF HANDMADE PAPERS
A bell-founder transforms melted metal into the three-dimensional frozen shape of a bell. The author of “Codes” practices a kind of “bell founding” on a flat surface. Spilled, spread and tilted, liquid masses set into the desired thickness and size, while leaving visible signs of their formation in the form of natural joints, seams, layers and edges. It is a record of the time of birth of each element.
Multi-element works arranged into a system of codes cause the viewer to enter into a relationship with time: the viewer is invited to move along these elements so they can seen in sequence, in space and in time. The viewer can move along the work, look at it from the front and the back, and in respect of the latest works, in a figure eight motion – both physical and mental. The calm, immateriality and immobility of Andrzej Prokopiuk’s “Holy Geometry” lead the viewer like a magnet to what lies beyond the time as perceived in the physical sense to the kind of time that can barely be expressed but rather that can only be contemplated or felt through emotion. It is at that moment that a fusion with the perceived reality occurs and the viewer is led to what lies beyond the boundaries of time and space into an ‘eternal now’. Such vehicular properties which stem from the material world are characteristic to certain fields of culture and art, such as Chinese painting, an icon, Gothic art, meditative abstraction, minimal art, the art of the earth, water and heaven, as well as to the world of things and the world of nature, for example the immensity of the desert, the vastness of the sea, the infinity of the plains, the majesty of mountain peaks or the starry sky.
In his book entitled “Das Heilige”, Rudolf Otto called such an experience numinous and distinguished elements of a religious experience which evokes an overwhelming power and inexpressible mystery. In Western art the numinous can be represented by silence and calmness or darkness and dusk and in Eastern art by void and spatial emptiness. I refer to this for two reasons. Firstly, the means of expression of the numinous in art as identified by the German religious scholar is evident in Andrzej Prokopiuk’s art and philosophy. Secondly, he himself writes that “loose, flat matter becomes an independent being, a noumenon, an autonomic entity”.
Let us recall the elements of the numinous as identified by Rudolf Otto: the sublime, the potent charm, incomplete darkness, silence and emptiness. Let us add to them the descriptive elements of numinous art: immobility, monumentalism, hieratism, subtleness, equilibrium, clarity, order and harmony.
All of these characteristics are valid and understandable to us. However, the element of Eastern art, namely the void and spatial emptiness, requires a clarification.
The question is whether – and if so, in what way – is Andrzej Prokopiuk’s art “empty”?
Let us follow the philosophical and religious ideas of the Far East. Set out below is a lengthy but informative exerpt from a book written by a Buddhist monk, Tchih Nhat Hanh, entitled “Being Peace”. The excerpt comes from the chapter entitled ‘The Heart of Practice’:
“A sheet of paper is a product or a combination of many elements; let us call them “elements of non-paper nature”. In a similar way, each entity is composed of elements of non unitary nature. A poet will clearly notice a floating cloud in this sheet. There is no water without a cloud, there are no trees without water and it is not possible to make paper without a tree. Therefore a cloud is embedded in a sheet of paper. The existence of a sheet of paper depends on the existence of a cloud. Paper and cloud are so similar to each other! Let us consider other things, such as the Sun. The Sun is very important because there would be no forest and no people without it. The Sun is needed by a woodcutter so that he can cut down trees and the tree needs the Sun, too, if it is to be a tree. Therefore one can see the Sun in this sheet of paper. If we go to the heard of the matter by looking with the eyes of the bodhisattvas, with the eyes of those who are woken up, we will see that in the paper there is not only a cloud and the Sun but everything to some extent: wheat, of which bread is baked for the woodcutter, the woodcutter’s father and so on. Everything is included in a sheet of paper.
Sutra Avatamsaka states that it is not possible to point out a single thing in the world that would not be connected with a sheet of paper. So we may say that a sheet of paper is composed of non-paper elements. A cloud, a forest and the Sun are all non-paper elements. There are so many of these non-paper elements in a sheet of paper that once we send them back to where they came from (a cloud will return to the sky, the Sun will absorb its beams and the woodcutter will go back to his father), an empty sheet of paper will remain. But what will leave this emptiness behind? The distinct identity of a sheet of paper was composed of elements not connected with this identity, the non-paper elements; once these elements are removed, the sheet of paper will become really empty, deprived of a distinct “I”. This kind of emptiness means that paper is full of everything, filled with the whole outer space. Existence of one little sheet proves the existence of the Universe.”
It is a daring statement, incomprehensible for someone who is used to thinking in a pragmatic way and living in a world of consumerism and entertainment. Yet, this monk manages beautifully to put on the same poetical scale both a sheet of paper and the Universe and reach equilibrium.
The artist’s wife Barbara also writes in a beautiful way about whiteness which gives source to, and which fills up the everyday reality of home and family:
‘I stood up among whiteness.
I feel ashamed.
Multiple white arrangements extract the whole evil out of me.
When confronted with them I am helpless.
The purity of these white compositions puts me into a new dimension,
decidedly better in its unlimited aspiration.
It is a good world.
I want to stay in it and taste it.
This whiteness evokes moods and perhaps memories.
These are scraps of PARADISES lost by many of us.
A white gown put on a quilt, a lit candle, the scent of incense. White Christmas Eve wafer, offered for the first time with solemnity, a veil blown about around the church gate.
These and maybe many other images appear.
These paintings ‘non-paintings’ are like bare truth
about YOU, about ME, about US.
Time meticulously mixed, heated with the warmth of your fingers,
touch, elation, caress.
White sheets of paper wrap around us like “angels of the good”
with Your sensibility.
It is only the porosity of the surface and its texture remind me
that the World is lurking outside our windows.’
We concur with this poetry. Indeed, Andrzej Prokopiuk’s art is a beautiful, true and good world.
Bogdan Chmielewski
Professor at the Fine Arts Faculty of the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Poland
January 2000