I recently visited a photographer friend of mine. He lives in downtown Warsaw: top storey, sloped ceilings, small windows just above the floor – just like the house in the prologue to the film Hands Up! – I thought. It’s January, I’m on my way to the artist’s home in the countryside to pick up paintings for his show. It’s blowing a blizzard. The vast white swathes of snow around are sporadically punctuated with black trees. Just like in Essential Killing. We reach our destination and load up the paintings. Each is a large-scale work, a film captured on canvas. There’s my favourite sea scene that looks like a frame from the Lebanese part of Hands Up!. In the movie, Jerzy Skolimowski says: ‘My painter friends who had stayed in Poland said more in the four walls of their studios than I could say in film.’ That’s not true. He didn’t say less, he said it differently. And with the same power and clarity in film and on canvas. Jerzy’s painting is about painting emotions. About painting a moment. His art draws its dynamism and intensity from the painter’s powerful gesture that constructs epic meanings. While some see suffering in it, others see hope. It sticks in the mind of all. Every time I see a birch grove, it think of his Azyl [Haven]. We’re back. We put the paintings in a storeroom where they will wait until the show. In one of the corners, I spot an angle grinder that looks just like the one in Moonlighting with Jeremy Irons. Am I the only one with an obsession with the imagery created by Skolimowski on film and canvas? Come see the exhibition and find out for yourself.
Marcin Fedisz
curator