Z żalem muszę donieść… [With Great Sorrow I Must Inform…]

The artistic language of Paweł Susid was shaped in the mid 1980’s. It was then that the artist began to paint relatively small-sized canvases and to use minimalist, geometrizing motifs with a stencil-inscribed text. The painting formula invented by the artist refers back to constructivism and conceptual experiences. Susid uses it consistently when commenting on social and political events, or small episodes, both in the universal, as well as a specific context. He chooses his words carefully, thus building lapidary but strong comments which correspond well with the forms he creates.

Many of his works are a commentary on the world of art. In the painting With Great Sorrow I Must Inform…, where the iconic dimension has actually been reduced to a text, Susid makes a blunt observation about the political entanglement of artists. His reflection is, on the one hand, about an ambiguous moral stance, the dependence of subservient artists on the authorities for reason of their material status and, on the other, about the attitude of the state apparatus to art which is completely instrumental, where its power is seen only as of potential use for propaganda purposes.

The painting The Nation Overshadows the Individual was created after a match played in Krakow during which a 16-year-old was killed by football “fans”. In the background of the stenciled sentence, we see a slightly drawn curtain with a leg showing from behind it. The red and white drapery clearly alludes to the Polish national flag. The artist poses a question about the notion of the nation, its definition and relations vis-à-vis the individual. The automatically evoked association is that of the slightly outdated meaning of the word understood as “people, population, peoples, crowd”. The artist criticizes the nation understood as such and asks about the limits to which one identifies with it as a “collective” of all individuals. As Susid suggests, the individual becomes lost in the crowd – both metaphorically, as well as literally.

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