User:Margieclay/Wikipedia cheatsheet

Marek Szczesny ( born July 30, 1939) was born in Radom, In the late 60's he was associated with a group of artists from the "Zak" student club and worked as a scenographer, creating posters and book covers. While in Gdansk he began auditing classes at the Academy of Fine Arts. Later he moved to Zakopane where he met professor Tadeussz Brzozowki who introduced him into the Union of Polish Artists and for the next 5 years worked with the alpine  rescue group GOPR. Later he worked as a set designer for several Polish films. In 1978 Marek Szczesny left Poland for Paris where he obtained a Ford Foundation grant. In Paris he has exhibited more than 30 solo exhibition as well as many in group. Between 1996 and 2008 he was awarded grants in the United States four times, Edward Albee Foundation in New York, Bemis Center in Omaha and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and the Adolpe and Esther Gottlieb Foundation. He lives and works in Paris.

How to explain my work ?

I find it extraordinary that in the banality of contact with  everyday existence there appears an unknown coincidence, some chance encounter, an unexpected tangle of events. That for me is the source of my artistic experience. By filling the canvas with forms I am gluing together those biographical crumbs that have stuck in my memory as extraordinary into some unfinished whole, an emotional return to my past, a wrestling with the emptiness of present time and an ephemeral connection to the imagined future.

I need to paint in a sort of uncertainty. There must be something uncontrollable in the process. I need to assume a risk, without premeditation. What continually fascinates me is the incapacity to realize my vision. I believe that what is remembered can become visible during the creation of a painting. In the process of my work there is always the emotional and the analytical just until the moment where I become exhausted.

I confront in my paintings and works on paper a balance of pictorial elements that overstep the painting's surface and challenges the traditional framework of canvas and paper. By physically extending and complicating space, I am trying not to impose limits. I attach shapes to the canvas and transport them beyond the frame of the painting. In my work topography plays an important part as a transfiguration of landscape and space, infinity and closure. The lines on my surfaces cover the territory of the painting, delineating paths, sides of roads, devious routes and highroads in a pictorial map full of depressions, ravines and bulges. I consider myself a nomad wandering over established routes much like a mountain climber retraces the path of previous wanderer.

I ask myself often these days what does it mean to be a painter ? What does it mean to cover canvas with pigment ? What does it mean to confront vision with the surface ? I return often to question the conditions of painting in a world of alluring media, global spectacles, virtual space and ubiquitous ideologies. For me it is not so much an esthetic problem as it is an ethical one. I refuse to surrender to the tyranny of the contemporary which I find to be a masquerade of artistic complacency and philosophical slumber. Those that would make a fetish out of reality.

Painting for me is founded on ethics. It is an art of constructed form, with a history that needs to be processed and a metaphysics that must be contemplated. This is a constant process of dismantling and reconfiguring anew. I am not abandoning the territory of the contemporary, rather attempting with difficulty to settle there in a different way.