Beyond Constructivism

Topographies of Uncertainty

The map is one of the most compelling testaments to the human need to put the world in order: the entire globe is shrunk to a sphere that can be held in one hand. That gesture holds both the joy of discovery and an act of power.
Włodzimierz Jan Zakrzewski (1946–2025) casts doubt on the trust we place in cartography. His borders (in the works from the exhibition Niebo nad Berlinem / The Sky over Berlin, for instance) glow with neon light: they draw the eye with a blaze of colour, yet their intense glare is like the conflagration of war. What we have long presented as a permanent and just division was in fact the outcome of conflicts, migrations, shifting political decisions and acts of violence.

The map interests him, then, not as an instrument for ordering the world but as a record of shifting balances of power. High politics is reduced to a sequence of lines, the movement of armies to an abstract rhythm, the drama of particular human beings – to marks on the surface of the canvas. A single painting (Obraz z 3 części / Painting in 3 Parts, 1977–1979) can be a fragment of a larger whole: new orders do not replace the previous ones, and the past leaves its imprint on the present.

A similar distrust of stable systems surfaces in the cycle Cruel Pessimism (1992), whose individual canvases match the artist’s own height. The titular cruel pessimism is a consequence of modern rationalism: man loses his privileged position in the cosmos and is left alone in a universe devoid of meaning. Zakrzewski splits this diagnosis into three readings – lyrical, romantic and cynical – juxtaposing a framed text with a depiction of the constellation Orion and an abstract painted surface. No order here is final; every image of the world remains a momentary construction.

A special place in Zakrzewski’s œuvre belongs to paintings in which he confronts different historical moments. In Two Battles of 2005, two distant events meet in a single pictorial field: history turns out to be a system of communicating vessels in which one event sets in motion an entire machinery of violence, pain and change.

A Shared Imagination

A comparable loss of faith in rational order can be found several decades earlier in the work of Karol Hiller (1891–1939), whose heliographics were made in the shadow of the crisis of modernity and the approaching war. What links the two artists is not a formal genealogy but a hypothesis: that the rational systems with which we describe our surroundings may reveal their fragility at any moment. Hiller painted in tempera on celluloid film, treating it as a negative for contact prints; he wanted full command of the process. Hence the sheer intensity of the emotional tension in his work: the apocalypse is constructed with precision. Meticulously drawn solids come under attack from organic forms, and the black thickens and turns menacing.

Set side by side, the two practices invert the map’s original function. It no longer serves orientation but becomes testimony to the instability around us. In Hiller, that uncertainty grows out of the interwar experience of watching the modernist promise of progress lose its value. Zakrzewski, in turn, speaks of a world after catastrophe – one that has not avoided generating new conflicts and crises.

The Cricket’s Voice

In What the Cricket Said on the Beach in Chałupy (2024) the painting takes the form of a tondo: a section of the firmament seen from an impossible vantage point. Irregular red patches, linked to the notion of afterimages, also bring to mind the wounds and scars of a landscape. A sound mechanism is built into the work: the painted composition is accompanied by the voice of a cricket. For centuries human beings drew maps, shifted borders and subordinated territories to one system after another. Above all this, meanwhile, there remains the sky and the calm sound of an insect on a beach.

Weronika Kobylińska