Parallel Action

Mikołaj Smoczyński’s photographs have all the traits we are used to assigning to paintings. The inseparable connection between the two modes of looking at the world, i.e. photography, which is a method of recording the surroundings observed, and painting, which has in fact become a language of a photographic medium, is apparent even in the descriptions of the artist’s works, which mostly uses formulations typical of an analysis of a traditionally understood painting. For a very short time at the beginning of his career Smoczyński was involved in painting. This experience would later become a constitutive element of his spatial installations and photography.

We can find no traces of narrative in his works, which would develop both in space and time. Instead we experience a richly nuanced story about the matter ubiquitously surrounding an individual. Smoczyński does not photograph things, nor does he study objects. He is more focused on space, directing the lens of his camera on the walls, floor, or ceiling enclosing it. Throughout most of his career Smoczyński has been very systematically researching the possibilities of the photographic medium, at the same time avoiding the convention of a document or a commentary, typical of photography. The painting-like specificity of his photographs is the result of a long process of exposure, sophisticated framing, large format copies, and the intentional juxtaposition of the detail of the recorded surface with the format of the medium.

The reality captured by Smoczyński does not have an equivalent in the outside world. The rich texture, permeating light and shade, the tangible “substantiality” of the frozen fragment lead our thoughts towards the external life of the matter and the means of its existence which are inaccessible to direct cognition. Associations with the abstract or the capacious formula of a “reality detached from reality” is very apt when formally describing the artist’s works but turns out to be insufficient when talking about the essence of its photographic imaginings. It seems to be more by the way of Aristotle’s concept of matter as the deepest principle of being, a basis of phenomena and their transformations, the immanent property of substance, its multitude, diversity, and divisibility.

Izabela Kopania

translated from Polish by Ewa Kanigowska-Gedroyć