History of a Painter from Borowy Młyn , 2011-2012 Installation

Mariola Balińska Krzysztof Gliszczyński: Beyond the Painting Krzysztof Gliszczyński’s latest works refer to the passage of time and, at the same time, to concepts related to the beginning and birth, the final disintegration and degradation of broadly understood matter. This labyrinth of related thoughts through which Gliszczyński’s painting leads us touches the essence of life and enables the viewer to search for metaphysical experiences in his painting. He treats our existence as a momentary presence in the universe, in which the goal may be to move towards the inevitable end. Through the “cracks of existence” – the incommensurability of the processes of being and passing – the artist observes reality, tries out forms of artistic expression that allow him to find answers to questions about not only the essence of art, but also the essence of life, the primeval beginning from which the cosmos was born. The artist treats reality as the outer layer of the world, hiding something more beneath the surface. Something that the human eye cannot see right away, something that we cannot touch. The experience of seeing that which is invisible makes you realize that it is possible to capture it, that there is a subtle boundary between fact and fiction that is fluid and yet constitutes part of our contemporary existence . Jolanta Brach-Czaina, in her book Szczeliny istnienia (Cracks of Existence), writes about perceiving reality from this perspective as follows: Cracks are places that hide something invisible. They shield us from insight and at the same time provoke us to delve into the hidden interior of reality, even though we know that our eye will not see anything in the dark […]. The cracks are intriguing not only because we cannot see whether there is something in them or not. We suspect that something new may emerge from these hollows . This mystery of existence, which the artist approaches through art in the space of creative exploration, is the starting point for a closer look at his art. Over the course of several decades, it has evolved not only towards expanding the area of formal exploration in order to go beyond painting, but also towards the secondary introduction of elements from other works, including degraded painting matter. Thanks to it, his art is in a constant process of acquiring a different status, while his search on the spiritual plane becomes an intellectual challenge.