Henryk Musialowicz: The Mystery of Darkness
David Humphrey
Other animals in the same series are like vacant shadows or dimly lit ghosts: Musialowicz’s depictions are never literal or naturalistic. Instead he tries to fill his paintings, he’s written, with “a subjective feeling of the form’s pureness, to paint what I feel and not what I see.” Born in Poland in 1914, where he lives today, he expresses interest in “primitive art” and in plant and animal fossils–“geological messages and traces of cataclysms.” He also mentions a 1956 Van Gogh and Rembrandt exhibition, which helped him realize that he was following “a mistaken and far too comfortable path.” Perhaps these divergent influences help account for his works’ powerful mixture of order and apparent disorder. His lines and smears and splotches could be the product of natural processes yet often collide with such dynamic intensity that artistic intentionality seems likely; Musialowicz’s pictures seem partly the products of a human hand and partly the products of centuries of erosion.
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Yet they have a message for us, as is clear from the starkly powerful number 31 (1978), from the “War Against Man” series. Two thickly black totemlike columns rise side by side in a picture made up almost entirely of deep grays and blacks, their shapes suggesting human presences–but also dead trees or burned logs. A feeling of bleak devastation is unmistakable, yet the columns also seem to rise, growing as if from below the bottom of the picture to rounded tops near the upper edge. They have an odd feeling of almost phallic pride and potency in the face of death–these burned-out icons seem to push against the emptiness, retaining a slight degree of relief against the flat background. Presenting both power and its negation, they offer an image of human assertion at the brink of apocalypse.
Musialowicz’s art is speculative, almost metaphysical; he questions the nature of human existence, our relationship to nature and time. His verbal statements may be a bit vague because he’s after truths that are hard to pin down. Yet he still believes in the power of color and line to invoke essences–not a fashionable attitude today, which is perhaps why his work is being shown at a nonprofit institution rather than a commercial River North gallery. At Maya Polsky, Russian painter Valery Koshliakov presents ideas related to Musialowicz’s in 17 recent works that take a more skeptical, almost postmodern attitude toward the power of paint.
One could also read the works, however, as depicting the triumph of the act of painting over cultural givens. For Koshliakov, a paint streak has the same reality as a tree trunk: each is simply an image. In this way he differs from Musialowicz, who posits an underlying reality that his pictures can only approach. The righthand panel of the large diptych Moscow Tower is dominated by one of Moscow’s monumental Soviet-gothic Stalinist buildings; two others can be seen in the middle distance. Rendering their sharp spires in rough brush strokes and a vast city in abstract daubs of black, white, and tan that just barely congeal into buildings, the painter seems to personalize the institutionalized cityscape, turning these monuments of evil into playful sketches.
This is an uncommonly strong pomo exhibit, turning what is in my view a highly suspect ethos into a convincing aesthetic expression. The excitement lies in the collision between Humphrey’s various forms of representation and the way he unmasks them all, high art and low, as conjuring acts, though he also captures some of what makes each valuable.
