(Black) Jack Painting

Painter, printmaker, sculptor. Born in Warsaw, Poland. Currently living in US. Connected to a sensibility in Polish Modernism that is coincident with the Neo-Expressionists in Western Europe and the United States, Siwkiewicz's work explores personal and universal aspects of humanity as a whole as well an individual. He deals with concepts of isolation, boundaries and transgressions and violations of thereof. Inspired by various sources from European art of the early 20 century through American post war movements, he pursues his own vocabulary and aesthetics within traditional medium of oil painting. His paintings often offer a fragmented metaphor of the body in an arbitrary psychic space. The formal relationships between the pictorial elements are tightly bound to the surface, thereby offering a tension between the elements that elicits a vision of inner-chaos, a turbulence that is inexorable and unmistakable in its coercion. The picture plane is thus destroyed as a purely conceptual structure. The dissemblance of the body as a psychic projection takes over and crowds the space, conflating the logic of both mind and body. The pictorial field is transformed into a symbolic nexus of thrusts and counter-thrusts building a composition that is indeterminate, yet aggressively defined. Like the painter Hans Hofmann, Siwkiewicz pays attention to the construction of the surface, the formal continuity of the shapes, the complexity of form in relation to the space. In contrast to Hofmann, Siwkiewicz's works appear less resolved in a theoretical manner and more open to what might be considered as a metaphorical resonance. The splaying of the figure as a discharge of psychic oppression suggests an action that is given to repetition, a form of visual aggressivity. In his paintings, one is unlikely to find a resolution in the conventional sense. Rather the viewer is more likely to be confronted and provoked by the artists visualization of unconscious violence. The painterly aspect of these works describes the process of the artists thought; yet the thought behind or within this process is not exempt from involvement. The visceral impact in the work of Siwkiewicz is the issue at large. To receive the thought behind these paintings is to empathize with the artists struggle in securing a sense of ones cultural identity in an increasingly abstract world - Robert C. Morgan.