Seances

Hubert Czerepok’s drawings belong to a large cycle of works produced in the course of the last few years. The works, which share the title Seances, are huge murals, large-format works on paper and serigraph prints, as well as small-scale drawings. Their common feature is their formal minimalism: compositional clarity, sketchiness, the means of expression reduced to the slightly feverish drawing which briefly yet precisely characterises the captured situation. The topics of Seances are related to issues explored by Czerepok in his other works; they include violence, evil, eroticism, as well as inexplicable events and phenomena with which he is fascinated.

Creating his Seances, Czerepok refers to filmic, graphic and photographic images he finds in the Internet, magazines or para-scientific publications. Among them are relatively new press-report photographs, such as ones linked with the World Trade Center and London terrorist attacks, as well as masterpieces that are canonical in the history of fine arts, like The Disasters of War by Francisco Goya or The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch.

Two of four drawings in the collection of the Podlaskie Towarzystwo Zachęty Sztuk Pięknych [Podlaskie Association for the Promotion of Fine Arts] cite The Garden of Earthly Delights by Bosch. Czerepok referred to the right wing of the triptych, which shows Hell; in this section of his work, the Dutch artist with his characteristic flair, precision of detail and incredible imaginativeness presented the abyss inhabited by monsters and the souls of the damned which are subjected to sophisticated torture. The next drawing is the panorama of Hiroshima after the explosion of the Little Boy atom bomb in 1945, while the last is an imaginary scene of demolition in a hotel room. The topics and inspirations for these works are extreme, but always united by the primary topic of evil lurking behind all these representations.

Czerepok’s Seances may be treated as referring to the might, omnipresence and manipulative power of images. Insistent and ubiquitous visual messages belong to the strongest impulses shaping our perceptions and conditioning our behaviour. The modern media are capable of showing anything, creating any image, convincingly visualising also those things which never existed or happened, but which nevertheless become an established and repetitive pattern due to the power of images and the possibility of copying them ad infinitum. Czerepok leans towards the thesis that today, an artist is not so much a creator of images, but a medium of a kind, through which those images flow. Placing them in a new context, the artist de facto confers a new life upon them. This assumption embraces also the critical dimension of many works in the Seances cycle. While the omnipresence of violent images in the television or newspapers leads to their taming, the purifying and de-contextualising procedures to which they are subjected by the artist compel us to look afresh at violence as such.

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translated from Polish by Klaudyna Michałowicz