Genesis reversed (fragments)
by Anna Maria Bielak
translated by Adam Kempa
Something Strange Happening to My Lawn: here is the exhibition’s title, which is an observation and a confession. Observation, because the painter looks, calculates, recreates and by this he places himself outside. A confession, because he is not afraid to look critically at the lawn which he considers his own and with which he identifies. This is me and my lawn, he says, self-mockingly. This is my world, which is being processed by me before your eyes. The process of creating, integrating the inner and outer artistic views, is cool and emotional. Artistic gardening play has a personal, as well as global, tragicomic dimension. The paradox follows the paradox, laughter echoes across the abyss. Series of paintings by Piestrak forms a story about the present, which we can follow by looking carefully, not only at the painting, but also at what is around it.
The exhibition participant is thrown into a whirlwind of postmodern chaos, the narrative of which is arranged according to the rules of a specific chronology. It quickly turns out that chaos is not the starting point, but the destination. Piestrak’s visions go against the canonical descriptions of creation. Here all movement happens in the opposite direction, man is not the culmination of God’s work, but its cause, the ungodly homo deus. In this way, he places himself at the epicenter of the history of creation, the original source of which is not chaos, but a pedantic, schizophrenic order.
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Enclosed from others, the lawn is necessarily deserted. Its emptiness evokes emptiness inside of me. The greater the attachment to one’s lawn, the greater the veiled feeling of emptiness of one’s existence. The lawn becomes a sign of nostalgia for the desert. Its symmetry, as beautiful as it is impersonal and bland, perfectly reflects the absurdity of existence. His fierce care and its topographic isolation are associated with the absurd passion of non-existence, with the acceptance of the role that has been assigned to contemporary man. I live because the mountains do not laugh and the worms do not sing [1], Cioran wrote. At the same time, bees do not pollinate flowers on the lawn, no fruit grows on trees, and no grains sprout underground: there are no flowers, trees or crops. No light illuminated him, no purpose determined his existence. There is no space for life, no space for seeking the depth of existence.
Of what is there, is the airiness, the surface, the intense color. What is there is carefree, surface, intense color. Everything seems to be accessible to the eyes; everything is possible to comprehend with the naked eye. This horizontal dimension is calmingly predictable, to some extent. To some extent, because for Piestrak the lawn seems to be only the starting point for his story, setting the framework in which it is to unfold. The title of the exhibition, as well as the work Something Strange Is Happening to My Lawn, throws us instantly into the unbridled strangeness of the lawn, which has somehow got out of hand, which may be taking control. It turns out that its sterility carries the risk that its stabilization and security are only apparent. What exactly can happen inside, in an empty square of an isolated, sterile space? Piestrak tells us about it in his own way, using his favorite collage technique. He combines heterogeneous, synthetic or recycled materials to violently exploit their organic nature. He plays with the form to draw attention to the content. On cans, he chews away the dead to recover the living. With the help of these treatments, with a mocking smile on his face, he guides us through his story.
[…]
Piestrak seems to be saying that the danger is in the air, that there will soon be an opportunity to get to know it. That perhaps for some it has already happened. In the painter’s story, man ignores nature, which demands itself more and more bluntly. He seems to be forgetting that his lawn is not just a square of green, that it does not hang in a vacuum, but has been and will always be part of the world. He does not understand that he cannot cover his ground with green strips once and for all, as with insulating tape; he cannot irrevocably possess his own lawn, for even he is not entirely his. The best he can do is place snowmen on it, or stuff useless decorations, waiting for something strange to happen which he would not be able to control anymore. Earth is an element, and an attempt to hide it under artificial, fleeting structures cannot lead to anything but a catastrophe. Then the only clue will be an empty board, which will be in vain to look for guidelines on how to proceed. This table (Official Announcements), as well as the abandoned mask of appearances, can be read as a sign of our future.
An exaggerated vision, one will say, no catastrophe is close to us. We have been waiting for the end of the world for ages, and it has not yet come. We are waiting for it not like the Jews wait for the messiah, but like a nouveau riche for an overdue invoice, which he will settle with one click. Someone else, more sensitive, will quote the therapist: I have the right to focus on myself, I don’t have to think about the whole world – he will convince. I do not have to grind the materials just to reveal more layers of chipboard underneath. I don’t have to talk about phantasmagoric tools to save the world. There are no such tools; instead it is me, my lawn, my little world, my affairs. Piestrak is aware of this: his visions are laced with self-mockery, and the layers of his multiple realities question themselves. We do not know what is what, what should be treated as a frame and what as a filling, what as a form and what as content, what is nutritious food and what parasitizes freely on the still warm tissues of the Earth. We do not even know what is genuine anxiety, fear for the future, and fetishism in all of this. In this madness, the painter laughs at himself, and we still do not know whether it is laughing or crying. Here we are and our world, he says. Let’s laugh together, because it is ourselves we laugh at.
