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The exhibition by Jan Sawka in the Queens Museum of Art offers a total panorama of the artist's long-range objectives. Standing as a telling event on the basis of the depth of his artistic invention, it documents his emergence as a painter of pictures from the time he arrived in America in 1979. After all, given the restriction under the totalitarian governments in his native Poland in the recent past, fine artists were never at liberty to take one or another medium merely out of desire, gift, or interest. Sawka, who was oriented toward the creation of posters, graphics, and stage design, carved out a predominant position at a very young age. Still, he was not free to paint, despite his yearnings to work with the brush and with tubes of color. So when he came to America, leaving restrictions behind he was finally able to explore the potential of pure painting to it's fullest extent. Thus as he moved from images that are more or less dependent upon his graphic habits to a more painterly statement -- where he could more naturally from one extreme to another -- we are permitted to follow his process toward pictorial independence. To designate Sawka as a complex man and a complex creator is an understatement. Yet, approaching his pictures requires forays into both aspects, that is to say the artist and the man, although the two are of course inseparable. At the very core of one aspect of his essence is an intense connection, affection, passion, and high hopes for his Poland, which has endured, despite more than its share of crash landings. Occupation at that hands of two cruel invaders was coupled with economic calamities. Behind all these hardships stands the strength of a people and its tradition which is also Sawka's strength. What I am trying to say, even if it sounds incurably romantic and from another historical moment, is that Jan Sawka is a patriot. His Poland is not its armies or national ambitions for new borders but a land of struggling intellectuals, poets, writers, dramatists, composers, and fellow fine artists, all on or close to the financial edge but creatively churning. Although essentially he has ben absent from Europe for a long time, by commitment and personality, by temparament and vision, Jan has retained a close bond with the uncompromising artistic spirits back home. His aspirations for Poland's future are in step with his concerns for the neighboring countries once again locked within a historical vise between Germany and Russia. Jan retains a curious and unrivaled intermingling of cosmopolitan realpolitik and a land-based wholesomeness. A large dose of fantasy combined with a healthy, inherent optimism conditions his thinking towards basic human conditions. Memory may be mixed with desire but it takes place within a claustrophobic interior room or within the confines of a phone booth: obituaries fade away into shadows of recollections of the pavement. The point is that Jan Sawka is a very smart fellow. His lively thoughts accelerate like a Ferrari Testa Rossa on the Utah Salt Flats, there being very little affecting our modern society that he does not ponder. He is an avid reader on all subjects, from biographies of world class automobile moguls to avant garde theater. Jan has a flair for rigorous analysis of current trends, political in-fighting, papal strategies vis-a-vis the Ukraine, artistic maneuverings of the establishment toward Arte Povera, and even the latest video from the Grateful Dead. Another side of Jan Sawka thinks in images, in segments and snippets, jagged Tuscan horizons and green fields in the New York Catskills. That is, the painter slides through his world of printmaking, for he has never stopped etching and he is still a master of the poster: in these mediums his visions are elaborate and even grandiose. Eve in his most ambitious projects -- filling a stadium full of his banners or lighting a vast, columned piazza with an unprecedented performance of light and color imaginings -- the artist and the social individual coalesce. It is a relatively easy matter for a critic to describe
his paintings, since the are quite suitable to narrative explication,
being graphic, clear, blunt statements in a modern context. More difficult
is pinning down the synthesis between the individual and the artist, each
aspect reinforcing the other. The Queens exhibition is the most manifestation
of Sawka's passionate pictures executed in America. To further complicate
the equation, however, he is very much an American too, operating in the
distinguished tradition that has offered constantly renewed strength to
the United States as a nation and to its newly arrived as well. His American
experience, which is the final factor in the process of cross-stimulations
that have given rise to a unique statement. (Adopted from Jan Sawka
in Queens" in the exhibition catalogue Jan Sawka Mixed Media Paintings
by James Beck.) - James Beck |
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