GALERIA AT

Works of the four artists participating in the current exhibition are examples of such textual bricolages in which individual signs generate their own flows of meanings. A row of school coat-hangs, arranged by Hanna Łuczak, bring memories of school-time and lessons, of the age of adolesence; the clothes packed in black plastic bags hanging on hangers suggest the state of lock-up, of awaiting and interruption just like the metal plates with the words "Break", "Pausa", "Przerwa". All this being completed with mirrors crossed with black stripes and a wall covered with a black foil. Everything is important here; the origin and arrangement of individual objects, the memories and stories associated with them; each element says something, means or signifies. Yet, where everything seems important nothing is really important, there is the impression of suspension, pause, defermant of meanings - some signs refer to other signs and the meanings drifts towards the infinity. If we do not want the work "to pass beyond us" we have no other choice but to stop this process of signifying and give the whole our own, personal meaning.
In Jacek Jagielski's installation the old cinema chairs, a children's swing, a rocking chair create a specific semantic field - childhood, taking off, rising up, flying. The most important element of the work is probably the paper Pegasus, spreading his wings for a flight, which focusses the senses generated by various parts of the installation and endows the work with some temporary and shaky balance. Every object, each detail is equally important and saturated with common, cultural, and personal meanings around which we have to move uncertain when whe should stop reading in order to grasp the meanings of signs used by the artist.
" The Ward of White Coats" by Andrzej Syska has a more theatrical character. White coats piling up on a floor, hanging from a ceiling, packed around a table flashed with lights remind of a film scenography with action taking place in some scientific laboratory. It seems to be an appeal to our narrative imagination, stirred mechanically by the flashing ligths, and also a kind of the artist's subversive proposition to make us think over our narrative stereotypes.
In Tomasz Wilmanski's installation the sound coming from two closed boxes is the dynamizing element. It is the sound that fills and enlives the dead space of some ghostly town. Outlines of houses painted on black roofing paper, each with a black window reminding of Cyclope's steady eye, shadows made with white powder create unreal landscape of a town in which the natural, primary and virginal turns into shameless, immoral, pornographic, pushed deep into subconsiousness.

The artists taking part in the exhibitions do not form a group nor represent a common artistic tendency. What links them is less emphatic but deeper; they share similar thinking about art they carried from the Academy and then developed in their individual artistic work. Their common denomitator is the belief that art is a private activity but not an expression ofthe artist's privacy; it is the activity that all the time anew, outlines, and demarcates the area of privacy. Art is not the expression but the mode of konwledge or rather self-konwledge and self-creation; while privacy is nothing permanent, granted for ever, but something that turns into a process of finding one's place in the world. That has been very well put by a Canadian art critic, Trevor Gould, who in reference to Hanna Łuczak said: "to make art is essentially to make one's own situation in the Polish reality". Today we can reject the political understatement inherent in this opinion and we can say that making art implies creating the artisfs position in any social reality which also has to be our private reality.

dr.Grzegorz Dziamski
(Fragment of text from cataloque)