“Black was a sacred color for the Abstract Expressionists, it was their lapis lazuli; they made a mystique of it, partly perhaps because of its austerity, partly perhaps because there was something splendidly macho in being able to produce a good strong black.” David Sylvester

Black is the main colour in Marcin Maciejowski’s palette whereas white is its polar opposite. Dark and smooth black, fetishistic black or pitch-black brown resulting from the fluorescent shine of paint that seems artificial. These overemphasised colours often appear on sweet and sour fruit drops, plastics, or synthetic clothing. When applied in painting, they determine the perception of the work as hardly sublime. Brought up in the 1970s, among the paradoxes of catholic and communist Poland, MM depicted his observations from childhood, and his art is based on those first visual experiences. I am fantasizing after my visit to Krakow: facades of buildings – still heated with coal – blackened with soot, church candles as well as traces of soot on white walls. Every colour that additionally appears against this background lightens up the scene, imparting bright colouring to it: a purple priest’s liturgical vestment, the red of letters depicted on the facades, the yellow of plastic ducks in the playground. Sentimental values or bright incarnadine do not appear in such places, but rather sharp contrasts between brightness and darkness. Today, MM paints from photographs – Gala, Vogue – all that is popular. Works based on photographs flood galleries and bore me: the colour of skin is often faded, the characteristic shadow cast by the flash is cool and still, the rest of the paint layer, devoid of any inspiration, is not worth mentioning either. In the case of MM, however, drawing inspiration from photographs does not pose any threat as he is a painter in the best sense of the word. MM “colours” instinctively and inspires.

Paint becomes the make-up of the canvas which it touches and which it does not leave. Colours appear like the second voice in music, like nuances capable of elevating the most ordinary song to the height of art: a bit of light blue, cobalt blue, sunny green, Naples yellow, crimson, red brown and lots of deep red and empty white. According to Roland Barthes, color is like a drooping eyelid, like a light swoon. The power of colour lets us turn the thinking off, it deceives our consciousness, it is the light exultation, an irritating erotic feeling of being lost.

Who do we come across in these pictures? Young women, blondes, dark-haired women with a bottle of bear in their hands. They do not appear on the red carpet, they rest in the atelier, at the table, they enter a room. I have a feeling I know them very well, the artist knows them well, and it is something that emanates from them. Intimacy like in Vermeer’s paintings. Though they do not sip milk with honey, but beer and energy drinks. Young women taking their lives in their own hands, without waiting, like once protagonists of Flaubert’s novels, for a momentous event. MM likes watching them, sometimes from the worm’s eye view, which makes them additionally abnormally large. He creates those perfect goddesses that never lose their form and always maintain their eroticism: here is a dream of a man who paints and observes, the dream kept alive throughout all the centuries of painting.

Ursula Hübner, July 2009