On the Perfection Underlying Life

Karina Wisniewska

My work is about perfection as we are aware of it in our minds but the paintings are very far from being perfect—completely removed in fact––even as we ourselves are. Technique is a hazard even as it is in living life.
In our minds there is an awareness of perfection and when we look with our eyes we see it. Seeking awareness of perfection in the mind is called living the inner life. It is not necessary for artists to live the inner life. It is only necessary for them to recognize inspiration or to represent it—also when it will always only be a hint, not more.

The act of painting a monochrome is an act of defiance. The passion for such reductive works has it source in the ability to see what some so-called expert critics often miss—a tutorial on learning how to see, where seeing is freed from the constraints of premature labeling and categorical thinking.

These works encourage, as perhaps no other type of abstract painting does, both a fine-tuning of the perceptual apparatus and a deeper penetration into the self as we learn how to be still. Despite their seeming simplicity, monochromatic paintings have an aura of mystery.

What these diverse works share in common is an opportunity for appreciating the complexity in the simplest of experiences. Indeed, this complexity begins with the fact that monochrome is a misnomer. Most of the monochrome paintings are virtual monochromes. That is, despite offering the aura of a single color, as a perceptual gestalt, most of the paintings are built up of many layers of different colored paints or different quartz sand structures—leading to expressive surfaces that have an organic feeling. Such works may also evoke a kind of visual hunger that drives us to explore the potential complexity of a painting’s shape, surface, and materials, as well as making us more sensitive to the surrounding environment such as the walls or other paintings in close proximity.

As a former musician, searching to combine music and painting to form a lively symbiosis, I am particularly interested in the artistic and philosophical legacy of John Cage and his musical heirs. For me Cage rates even higher as a ‘sound philosopher’ than as a composer. Experimental forms of expression that deal with noises and unusual series of sounds are usually rapidly rejected as “impossible to listen to” or “un-harmonic”. Many of his works seem to me to be constructs that are utterly fascinating when you read the underlying theories behind them, yet in reality fail to leave behind the corresponding auditory impression. His works are not orientated towards a need for music but rather created out of a desire for something unheard and experimental. A more intimate understanding of them wrenches everyday auditory perception off the established tracks and opens the ears to conscious hearing.

Eyes can also be opened to conscious seeing. The spaces and coloured lines of my sonorous pictures––acrylic streaks enriched with natural or dyed quartz sand—are full of apparent fluidities, reflections and intangibilities. The contemplation of compositions and chances leads to a suggestive natural landscape. The roots of the pictures lie in memory and in the association of feelings and recollections. Chance occurrences and deliberate intentions cancel each other out. The directions of the coloured paths allow themselves to be guided and steered but not the running and blending of the drops of colour. Everything is open and at the same time everything appears structured. An order of chance and structure creates a new reality of space and time.
It is from the moment, the here and now, that the colours and the structures that paint our world arise. With virtuosity and nevertheless straight from the heart, I probe boundaries way beyond the actual canvas – and create a feeling of infinite expanse.

My painting is one of time and movement. It is not static, and its balance is fragile. The lines, which grow thicker and then thinner again, seem to push each other, melt into each other, become a sort of delicate swaying weave.
At first we only recognise lines, colours, proportions, indications of shape and then comes an impression of the presence of a second nature. What we see are diagrams of energies, structures, force fields, fine crystalline patterns that we think we can recognise because their naturalness leads us to suspect that we are confronted by similar structures to those in which nature reveals itself. This visual perception overtakes feeling and is based on the fact that we carry primitive pictures of landscape or primitive designs of nature inside us, archetypes or prototypes of the landscape and nature. Over and above these images, which are entirely personal and unique to the individual, is the hint of a deeper connection between the personal world of expression and the universal in and around us, the familiarity of a strong sense of recognition. In this can still be seen a love of the wonderful act of creation defined by Franz Marc as the aim of art: “to trigger the entire system of our individual feelings and impressions, to reveal an unearthly existence that inhabits the space behind all things”. This special mood gives the pictures their sound, the belief that there is a distinct point at which the inside and the outside, the near and the far, the spiritual and the material converge, and that arriving at this point represents the reconsummation, at a universal level, of a unification with the material world.

John Cage was a philosopher, a painter and a man of letters. Behind all his work lay a tangible need to “create awareness” of music, of behaviour and of our ability to think. The effect that Cage’s work had on the music and art of the 20th century can scarcely be measured, let alone critically assessed. It is indisputable that the developments in the music of our times cannot be understood without referring back to his music and his ideas.
As a great experimenter of new music and representative of the most extreme avant-garde, Cage pushed the boundaries of the traditional view of music and had an enormous influence on many composers. He exploded the traditional concept of musical pieces and made an important contribution to the emancipation of sound. As early as the 1930s he started to examine contrasting sounds (ordered harmonic structure) and noise effects (less ordered or disordered harmonic structure) and their use as musical elements and wanted to explore the individual sound of every object in accordance with the saying “Everything is sound”. He spoke of a music that constantly surrounds us, the everyday noises. He wanted to move people to increase their awareness of these sounds and to see them not as disturbance but as an enrichment of perception.

Zen ideas are clearly evident in Cage’s thinking and creativity. Concepts such as randomness, chance and inter-penetration became the defining factors of his work and reached their zenith in his work “Silence” 4'33", probably his best-known piece. Cage wanted to fathom the physical content of the word “silence” but came to the conclusion that it is impossible for people to “hear” silence because of their own bodily sounds; rather it is a spiritual state. The impulse to write this silent work came from Robert Rauschenberg’s white canvases, which appear at first glance to be empty pictures yet which also do not contain “nothing” but instead are characterised by structure.

karina wisniewska © 2006