Internal states of the contemporary individual

Interpret is always a partial work, unilateral, provisional...
Yet the interpretations are inevitable and precious because they introduce a
conceptual order, a systematization, even if, only by a determinate point of
view.
The production of "operaio celeste" is original and unique, his works are disturbing, anyone observes his artworks is unable to remain indifferent. If are the colours, the particular human forms to strike, or the unusual techniques, or the more unthinkable uses and approaches to materials, it is hard to say, but every individual set in front of his artworks remains deeply struck. Something digs to the root of our humanity when  we stop to observe the work of the artist.
Affiliation and disorientation are the contradictory feelings that characterize even his condition of transplanted in Italy from his country of origin, the Poland.
Exactly this situation, the condition to be among two worlds, in two distinct dimensions, among two so different countries, allows him to have a privileged eye, a condition of vision from the outside.
Integration and not integration in a cultural context gives an extraordinary ability of analysis, that shine clearly through his works and that appear always more evident if we consider his artworks in their totality.
The work of "operaio celeste" is the mirror of the internal states of the contemporary individual.
The artist’s more great ability is to give a vivid display of the more diffused contemporary emotional states, that are tied to the uncertainty and to the indecision of this era of continuous changements.
Every form of anguish, fear, uncertainty, contradiction that the individual experiments in contemporary everyday life, seems take form through his realizations.
According to the most important contemporary sociologists*, currently everyithing is reduced to the individual.
There is no more anyone or anything to which it is possible to address the guilt of our failures, we live in the “Risk society” (U. Beck), everyone is forced to build his life’s project, not one social role, not one life results determinate.
Isolation, loneliness, anxieties, endless self-analysis and self-critique, intangibility, contradictions constrict the contemporary individual in to a clamp.
The work of the artist is conceptual, he tries to bring to light the feelings we live daily. From here, all that elements as vortexes, cages, reticulate, contortions that invade his paintings.
And still, threads, clothes, canvas and pieces sewed among them as to point out the
necessity to connect the disparate, heterogeneous and conflicting parts of the contemporary life. Unpredictable overlaps, explosions of splendid colours, bewilder instinctual symbolisms, superficiality, banality, strengths, mysticism seem represent the other side of the contemporary situation that is the boundless freedom of which the persons currently dispose, and the possibility to extend always more the field of experience.
During his wander in the interstices of the soul and of the individuality of the contemporary society, "operaio celeste" will continue to give traces, extremely touching representations, nearly snapshots, of the feelings felt by the contemporary man.

      *Notes: Z. Bauman, "Liquid modernity", 2002; U. Beck, " Risk Society ", 1992;
 A. Giddens, "The consequences of the modernity ", 1994.

Adriano Tarasco

 

It works. It doesn't work

It works. It doesn't work.
When Riczard Wilczek is in front of his canvases nothing is left to an aesthetic assesment of his own work. Led by instinctiveness, he just says “it works”, or “it could work, but it still doesn't”. Just instinct. The same instinct that Wilczek uses to re-create a zoomorphic sculpture from a piece of wood or any waste material previously used in another human context.
One of the most impressive features of Wilczek's art is his capability to sympathize with raw materials in order to redifine in newly born artistic terms the banality of common things as well as the longevity of what elsewhere would be dismissed as waste. But this procedure, far from simply being an up-to-date eco-friendly way of thinking, in Wilczek is pivotal in the way it puts in contact the past of the object with the present of the piece of art, both bidimensional and tridimensional.
The complexity of Wilczek's artistic texture lies in the cross-action of his applied knowledges, ranging from carpentry, to tailoring, to restoration of antiques, within a process that, far from cancelling the previous passage, exalts the overlay of many different stages.
Painting on regenerated pieces of cloth rather than on second hand cardboards, Wilczek is able to create a unique stream of visible signs, all converging to a lyrism of forms that mock the complexity and rapacity of our consumistic society, as if he would say: It's all down there, that's it!
His reflective personality talks for him through the shaping of animals or humans caught in a range of static, meditative, even self-satisfied situations, and it's all down there, there in the still frame of a longer tale left to the observer to be continued.
Men and women here and there may have heads of birds, long-billed figures cloistered together in everyday rituals, elsewhere left alone, playing with geometric circles as if they were fixing the major and intimate borders of a newfoundland. The virginity of these subjects erupts from the work of art even when there is a  figure pointing a gun, or an enigmatic assembly around a table, or a multiple-limbed body bent in a most unnatural position: they are armed but naked, cryptic but undisguised, twisted but straight, just like us. Just like us.
And it works!

Alessio Tosoni

 

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