Song of a Lonely Traveller
Notes of a Journey through Time
The greatest formal achievement of Maciej Plewiński’s iconoclastic artistic activity is his total disregard for the niceties of form. And since form as such has of late been discarded or at best remains the ruinous phan- tom of derivative artists, so much the better. What than do Plewinski’s frozen images impart? What do they say? What is in them?
The Polish word for photo is a neologism which signifies many non-existent things; in particular the fact that what is in front of the camera may be both objectively captured and, at the same time, also be beyond the consciousness of the man pressing the button.
One could argue equally strongly that cameras are supposed to record the inner visions of the button- presser. By this token the series of works presented by Maciej Plewiński in Notes of the Journey through Time bears all the hallmarks of poetry.
I mean by this romantic poetry which, contrary to popular belief, does not concern romances (for these we can look at the Internet with its blogs or to popular literature produced for the masses), but concerns other matters.
Romantic poetry, as in the case of Plewiński’s iconoclastic art, sets out to lament the progression of the world with its ruins, graves and unfulfilled intentions and is thus elegiac. It sees beyond thee pragmatic veil of deception we call everyday reality right through to the true picture of Heraclitean chaos, or simply CHAOS.
The lamenting of ruins, of time passing and of temporality is not an impediment. It allows the artist to fall into contemplative awe at the beauty of it all. And for all the openness and instability of the world, it still remains an Arcadia in which, despite the ominous inscription “et in Arcadia ego…” (apparently written by Death itself), shepherds can safely rest.
And what of the fact that beyond the semblances of permanence and unchanging reality, there does lie change and yet more (friutless) striving? And what of the fact that everything we photograph is anyway sim- ply a scintillation of fractals which, even though invisible, can look like anything?
Irony is an aspect of, or a companion to, melancholy. Irony is a deconstruction aimed at those who con- sider the world a reality for us to conquer, describe, understand, travel, classify, evaluate and describe to our friends, embellishing ourselves in the process. Irony and melancholy sometimes bring out in people feelings of superiority, pity, and even disdain or nihilistic despair. Maciej Plewiński, and we the viewers, are free of these emotions for we are protected from them by the force of the beauty which imbues his artistic vision.
