Kōan practice involves concentrating fully on the content of a kōan but not in order to grasp it with one’s mind but to unite with its spirit. Abstraction is the condensation of logical intuition.
Image is a certain way of accumulating energy.
“Abstraction will save painting.”
Bonnard
The Painting of Grzegorz Winkler
“All things depend on the content given to the signs. Their meaning is constantly to be sought”
excerpt from the film “Into Great Silence”
Among the many practices in contemporary art, painting is probably still the most original ritual. Painting is often intuitive. Hence the naturalness of the painted sign.
Grzegorz Winkler, creating abstract paintings, or situating himself on the border between figuration and abstraction, uses signs. Through the play of colour and form, he creates a unique atmosphere, saturating the space with emotion.
. The way of the painter today is not persistent seeking meaning, creating definitions. It is rather a contemplation, listening to the barely perceptible, hidden pulse of reality, the mysterious murmur of the world, whose meaning we cannot comprehend living in a world of consumption immersed in virtual reality. Sometimes, however, stopping for a moment, intuitively we sense its presence. In primitive cultures, such as African, art took on a symbolic character, almost magical, and the objects that by convention we call works of art were accompanied by rituals and reflected the terrible forces of nature, but also directed attention towards spiritual reality.
In painting, what is important is intuition, the play of form and colour, a glimmer at a particular moment.
Unrestricted by any rules, the expression of the gesture of painting is informel or static, a calligraphic articulation:
“The sign and the brushwork possess individuality (...)
The brushwork has an energy reserve (...)
The sign breathes
The sign has a nobility
The sign has a voice
The sign has a “spirit”
Thus writes Ojio Yusho in his treatment of the Japanese art of calligraphy.¹ The characters in Far Eastern calligraphy were originally pictograms which simplified the form of real objects. “The details of each pictogram, even the ordering of strokes, was defined and detailed on the principle of universal consent. However, these traditional rules were for the calligrapher like metrics for the poet – they laid some basic framework within which space remained to develop individual talents.(...) Finally, Chinese characters were ideograms capable of expressing thoughts and emotions.....” ²
For us Western people, experiencing and immersing ourselves in the aesthetics and philosophy of the Far East represents a real challenge. We have to give everything a definition. In fact, we live surrounded by informational garbage and chaos, overwhelmed by historical trauma. “Japan (the ideal Japan which the philosopher Barthes loved and which he wrote about), meanwhile, is the culture of empty characters: carefully articulated, but with no reference to a hidden sense, pointedly refusing transcendence, a country of asemia (...) lies not in giving things a meaning, but removing it, neutralising or even “emptying” it, which can best be seen when the Zen Master suggests a koan to his student. The student’s response does not depend on the fact that he has to understand the master’s message (as monks in the West, the polysemic culture’s learner, would do), but that the Master’s absurd statement should receive a response or gesture every bit as absurd, or meaningless...”³
The empty space in the picture is never dead. The planes of colours exist equally and are interwoven, as in music: the sound is as important as the rest.
The simplified forms in the paintings of Grzegorz Winkler may be a reflection of things, a distant echo of items which have been simplified, becoming the sign. The painter’s sign may be at the same time completely divorced from reality – becoming immersed in the painting material by abstract form. Sometimes this form is very fragile, only sketchily suggested, it dies in the background. The essence of his work could be equally understatement, disappearance, abandonment of that which is filled – like the state of suspension of action in Japanese Noh theatre, when the actor becomes motionless, leaving the spectator in the face of emptiness “calling up a suggestion of an infinite dimension outside the work of phenomena.” The painter throws a sign onto the canvas, an ideogram – understood as a subjective painterly response to reality. Painting a picture, he creates the world anew.
Sabina Winkler-Sokolowska
