Space and light 2, Space and light 4

The oeuvre of Antoni Mikołajczyk conveys his consistent campaign to liberate light, which he has always used as purely and directly as possible. Yet light was not an aim in itself to Mikołajczyk, but rather a means of expression and a tool, difficult to use, but enabling the artist to analyse space, form and matter with the view to discovering intangible areas of reality. In Mikołajczyk’s works, those areas were the areas in which the real would encounter the unreal, the visible would meet the concealed.

Mikołajczyk began experimenting with light in the early 1970s, when he began to use it more boldly in his spatial forms. Light became a nearly sculptural material in those forms; it coexisted with objects, either defining their forms or causing their de-materialisation by blurring the contours between the object and its surrounding space. Apart from installations, Mikołajczyk explored the issues of light in photography. The so-called light records constituted a special field of his artistic search; he investigated in them not only the nature of the photographic medium itself, but also the interdependences between light, space and time.

Mikołajczyk recorded traces of light emitted by various sources of illumination, for instance lamps or street lamps. Holding a camera with its shutter engaged in the B-mode, enabling a long aperture time, he moved in both space and time. The effect of this process were traces left on the film by spots of bright light, which often assumed the form of criss-crossing lines. The image obtained by Mikołajczyk was thus a record not of reality, but of the spatio-temporal relations present in it. In the process of recording, which lasted for around an hour, the artist himself was as important as the light, time and space. By walking with the camera, he in fact determined the path of light, the trajectory of intertwined lines of light. These very penetrating yet dreamlike works were thus strongly marked by his presence in both their physical and spiritual aspect.

Mikołajczyk once described the creative path as “building a positive utopia”. In the context of his photographs, this statement may be understood in terms of consistent attempts to reveal the area where everything exists in the state of suspension; an area which seems impossible to capture.

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translated from Polish by Klaudyna Michałowicz