The publication entitled The Memory of Time – Painting in the Time of Spiritual
Bankruptcy includes over 50 essays pondering various issues of contemporary
art in the context of my own experience as a painter, in addition to comments
and reflections pertaining to variegated creation-related notions revealed in
the course of creative processes during my artistic activity. The analysis of
the so-called creative programme of particular painting series: Fantomanie,
Kosmogonie, Księga słońca, Głowy, Rytmy pamięci, Ogrody ciemności, Baśniowe
fantazje, Wirtualne ikony is an attempt to present and describe ideas- and
themes-related assumptions of individual artistic productions, as well as to
specify the character of their painting language that would correspond to the
content and idea expressed by them.
Another part of the publication consists of illustrative material – photographs
documenting particular works of painting created throughout the
40-year period of my artistic activity. The texts and paintings documentation
compose a consistent whole, while the truth and authenticity of individual
authorial experience of painting add credibility and substance to the content
of the essays. What is pivotal idea here and what constitutes the kernel of both
theoretical part (essays, comments) and illustrative material is an attempt at
presenting the dramatic withdrawal, atrophy, one may even say bankruptcy
of experiencing spiritual space, which is palpable in productions of socalled
contemporary art. Philosophical considerations, reflections of such
authors as Plato, Saint Augustin, Pseudo-Dionysius, Robert Grosseteste, Saint
Bonaventura, or Meister Eckhart referring to the activity in the realm of art,
seem today so distant and so unfitting the contemporary mental space, that
the awareness of cultural crisis, of disappearing elementary reference points
become a dramatic sign of the nowadays cultural disintegration. Within this
shattered, fragmented space my painting activity externalizes the voice of
a human individual searching for those ignored, unwanted, omitted spiritual
spaces, the traces of understanding with great artistic tradition, with efforts
of many old masters who wrote, but also materialized through art their great
intentions, ideas, creative plans
