“… In Marek Szczesny’s works topography plays a significant role as a transfiguration of landscape and the place, infinity and closure.  No wonder, then that Szczesny has no trust in limits even if he does not abandon them.  Shapes attached to the canvas, neither in the form of collage nor assemblage, transport a given artistic question beyond the frame of the painting, while  in papers, never closed with an outline, only the surroundings endeavor to define the fluid interior of a still.

Painting founded on ethics, says Szczesny, is an art of a constructed form, with a history that needs to be processed and a metaphysics that must be fathomed.  Processing painting, a constant process of dismounting and piecing anew, is not, then, in Szczesny’s art an abandonment of the contemporary territory, but of a difficult attempt at settling down there in a different way.  This is not a question of taking root but of an unattainable balance between the current place and the non-placement (u-topia).  This is a territory that is not well defined, torn and glued together, punctured with holes and patched up.  Contemporaneity understood in such a way, close to Szczesny’s heart, is a balancing between the current,  and memory, which justifies the current in circular returns, crossing lines, shapes superimposed on one another like carbon copies, in the layers of colors that shine through,  If memory is of a universal dimension, it encompasses the entire anthropology of painting, from the magical imprint of a hand on a cave stone and a phantom of presence in the Faium portraits through rationalization of vision in the modern illusion, to the sphere of spiritual cosmos and the screen of libidinal pulsations in 20th century  art.  If memory has a universally human dimension, it contains pain and joy, faith and blasphemy, truth and falseness of man, recognition of the Other and hatred toward the Foreign, the time of truce and the tragedy of wars.  If memory has an individual character, it becomes lost in well-known landscapes and labyrinths of houses, among people close to us and the faces we recognize, in the moments we have experienced and those that have remained potential only.  …”

 

Andrzei Turowski ,  fragment of text, catalogue”Marek Szczesny”, Hotel des Arts, Toulon, France  2002