Andrzej Syska /CSW

GALLERY 2

Andrzej Syska "DARK ROOMS"
------------Exhibition opening: 6.10, 6 p.m. and on view until 16.11
------------Curator: Ewa Gorzadek

"Lumenophobia" 1996

Andrzej Syska began working in the 1980's as part of the Poznan group O'PA. His first major interest was in painting. In works from that period, the artist dealt with assorted spatial problems and geometric surface arrangements.

Later, Syska's works evolved into three-dimensional objects, or installations, which strove to break free of any illusion of space. He was using ready-mades grouped into intuitively arranged sets, generating new and unexpected meanings that successfully violated common semantic categories. Those were regulated either by laws of their own or by "quotations" from the natural world. In the beginning of the 90's, light was the element which began to assume an increasingly important role in Syska's multi-media installations. In works such as "Lumenophobias" (Lumenofobie), "Lightzones" (Swiatlosfery) or "Aberrations" (Aberracje), light constitutes a basic creative material and a dominant energetic form, building up the works' structure and allowing hidden images to be revealed, or enlivening them.

Light is often the outcome of complex combinations of electric circuits and its source is not readily identifiable. Processes which take place in the artist's work seem to be enigmatic and evoke feelings of uncertainty and tension. At the same time, they induce questions concerning our perceptions of the surrounding reality. For Andrzej Syska, light is not only a carrier of information but an information in itself. Its intensity, colour, frequency, place and time of appearance are the decisive factors that determine form and content of the above mentioned information. Aside from light, an important role in Syska's installations is attributed to heat or, generally, temperature alterations which cause different, purposefully created mechanisms to be switched on or off. Due to these constructive factors, the works that are created by the artist as self-regulatory and self-controlled organisms, begin to "live". Their behaviour is mostly incidental, random and irrational and hardly predictable or controllable, which undermines the illusory functional obviousness of the technoid world.

Andrzej Syska's works are alive and dynamic, yet the definition of time to which they conform to has been deprived of its linear structure. Therefore, all the inclusive elements are not chronologically ordered, but they constitute a set of incidents. During the exhibition at the CCA, Andrzej Syska will present 5 installations made between 1995-1997.

Firm SANSERVICE Sp. z o.o. provided audiovisual equipment for this exhibition.