In-Visible: Abstractions and Narratives

Galeria Arsenal
Bialystok, Poland
September 10 - October 17, 1999

Wojciech Lazarczyk, Robert Maciejuk and Odili Donald Odita are abstract painters -- although Odita also works in other media -- whose meticulously crafted art refract a number of cultural traditions or situations: Eastern European; Western European; American; African. While sharing the designation of "abstract" and certain formal similarities, their divergences are even more arresting, reflecting how problematized, or at least extended, current definitions of abstractions can be, how plural identities have become, how reversible and contingent.

Robert Maciejuk plants his geometric configurations at the intersection of the non-objective, the abstract and the representational, details he extrapolates from idealized Renaissance cityscapes and Uccello's obsessive studies of perspective, from road and railway signs and corporate logos, like the BMW insignia. He strips them down, cleans them up, divesting them of accumulated narratives and cultural signification. At the same time, Maciejuk acknowledges the perceptual complexity of these images, their fluidity, their multiple meanings, the simultaneity of their existence as pure abstraction and as representations, as signs of high modernism and pop art; as icons in the service of capitalist materialism and utopian aestheticism. Odili Donald Odita, a Nigerian-born artist who has lived most of his life in the United States, also posits multiplicity and simultaneity, weighting his serrated fields of interlocked triangles with aesthetic and extra-aesthetic baggage. His honed, flattened shapes, activated by the flash of their scissoring diagonals which cross the width of the pictorial surface, are part of the vernacular of Western modernism but also refer to African-inspired motifs with their insistent linearity, dissonant colorations, abrupt, syncopated rhythms, and non-centralized composition where emphasis is displaced to the peripheries. As Odita manipulates increasingly raveled, increasingly equivocal cultural boundaries, what he touches upon is the nature of difference, the protocols of cultural precedence and hegemony, the guises of cultural imperialism, the complexities of identity. Whose geometry is it? Like Maciejuk, Odita amplifies the density of readings. Wojciech Lazarczyk, on the other hand, seems at first glance, the most classic abstractionist of the group, but even his velvety textured, richly hued canvases are not merely color field or monochromatic painting but also emblematic of that genre of painting, inflected though the history of Eastern--specifically Polish--and Western European modernism as well as through American non-objective art, for instance, Rothko, Reinhardt, Ryman. Lazarczyk's "pure" paintings are what they appear to be but they are not only that; their significance is as layered as their facture and situated within a larger context of reductivism. In a more oblique manner than the others, his elegantly reticent paintings critique notions of originality and authenticity, of continuity and disjunction within a received, a historiated idiom.

To reconfigure parameters, to undo and contest temporal constraints and certainties, to increase the amount of information absorbed, to overthrow equilibrium, to extend the discourse and assert identity is one series of aspirations; abstract paintings, viewed from this vantage point, as metaphor or rhetoric, represent much more than they actually depict. On another, more literal level, however, these are also just paintings, representing only themselves in all their material, idiosyncratic and particular splendour. Wojciech Lazarczyk, Robert Maciejuk and Odili Donald Odita depend on both to present their respective cases persuasively, to offer what are ultimately the public consequences of private desires with intelligence, grandness and generosity.

Lilly Wei
New York, August, 1999