cefvigo gallery

Wojciech Prazmowski seems to confirm the age-long rule that man has been always balancing between his imagination and reality, between opposite realities, the symbol of which can be the arms of the cross.

What is photography or rather let us ask what is a picture for Wojciech Prazmowski? lt seems that it is a supplement to the classical triad "thing - man - spirit" which enables him to get a very subjective view of the world. A world being transformed by time but not the time remaining exclusively physical,his time is mythical and symbolic.

He defines his artistic credo like this: " (…) it seems to me sometimes that some of my photographs I must have seen already. I do not know when it was, but they are surprisingly familiar to me. And in order to prove that I really had been there I have kept some pictures (or rather their remains). What I do is perhaps a single photograph, always the same about the passage of time".

Wojciech Praimowski, like the renaissance artists, seems to believe that art, that is an active being, offers us the possibility of transcending the human time. An evidence of such human activity are for him old yellowish photographs, postcards, reproductions, casual and created photos, all of them being a genuine document of our knowledge of the world and a confirmation of the intuition that there exists something beyond the human life. In Prazmowski's work shade is very important, but not in the pejorative sense given it by Carl Gustav Yung as the "worse part of personality". It seems that he must haye a special feeling for the instructions of Leonardo da Vinci with the famous idea of "sfumato": "Shade has a greater power than light because it takes away luminosity from the bodies or even deprives them of it". All this has much to do with Wojciech Prazmowski's biography, as an artist he belongs to the generation of which Tadeusz Nyczek said: "Our generation started in completely different circumstances; they were starting towards freedom while our start was marked by (war) enslavement".

In Wojciech Prazmowski's art we can find however a value which in each of his cycles -"The Family Album" or "L'ange brisé", is constant and indisputable. It seems to be resistant to time. It is a praise of youth, of childhood, of these wonderful periods in the life of each human.

Prazmowski's characters are based on the one hand on elusiveness, they carry the burden of existence, and on the other hand they are subject to the passage of time. As it is in the case of the woman from the "Honey moon near Gdansk 1939", captured at her "Attempt to fly". At this single moment appear life and death, ascent and fall, she is like a butterfly because we can't help thinking that soon her body will turn into dust. A similar approach we can find in his "The Soldier's Small Dictionary", but here some elements are not simply symbolic or metaphorical. Introduced into the picture's created space they are not given a symbolic dimension, they do not express the artist's soul in the search for truth. All the pieces of equipment listed beside the figure of the soldier -named in various languages in the caption- firmly state their existence.

Marek Zielinski
Director of the Festival of Chamber Arts in Katowice