OLAF BRZESKI – Shine

“Shine” is an exhibition of sculptures and drawings by Olaf Brzeski. The project includes older works and completely new ones, made specifically for the show at the Arsenal Gallery. In the title the artist invokes light, blaze, a moment of revelation, yet “Shine”, like any light, casts a shadow. Brzeski’s exhibition is therefore filled with darkness which hides phantasms and images of the monstrous, among which the artist seeks his own image.

Brzeski located in the centre of the “Shine” exhibition his self-portrait, a sculpture where he depicts himself as Pinocchio. This is a figure of a liar who, like the puppet from Collodi’s story cheats and yet remains completely sincere. This is also an ostentatiously male figure. The sculpted self-portrait of the artist is a male nude of an overtly and grotesquely phallic character.

“Shine”, then, is a narrative which the artist tells in the first person. This is a story about a journey. The metaphorical destination of the trip is a forest, a mythologised space of wildness, instinct, desire, and unconsciousness. This is moreover an inward journey, a road during which the artist stands face to face with his own nature.

One of the recurrent motifs in the discourse of Olaf Brzeski’s oeuvre is reflection on bestiality. Brzeski sought its manifestation in what is not human, i.e. in monstrosity, deformation and savageness. Traces of the search are present at the “Shine” show in the form of grotesque, monstrous images in the series “Villains”. Here the artist comes to terms with images born in the imagination. In the most recent work, which premieres at the Arsenal, Brzeski departs from the zone of the imaginary and confronts his images with reality. The artist gets into a car and takes a ride outside the city. He roams the forest paths with roadside prostitutes. The sculptor invites them to his car, whose interior becomes a studio. The women pose and the artist is busy making sketches which might later be used for a sculpture.

The relation between the artist and the model is invariably rich in innuendos; the creator wants to possess the object of his gaze and the work is equivalent to sexual gratification. On a forest path where Brzeski parks his car, the erotic metaphor of a creative act becomes an obscene nude. The girls whom the artist invites to his car are ready to offer their bodies for a few banknotes but they also want money for posing. The physical distance between the sculptor and the model is shortened to a minimum marked by the claustrophobic space of the car-turned-studio, but emotionally they are separated by the impersonal and alienating character of the economy of prostitution, which objectifies both side of the contract.

What does the artist really want during the ambiguous trips to the woods? Is he after a theme that awaits him on a morally swampy territory that is off-limits? Does he look for models marked by the brutal truth of “true life”, or the mythological aspect of the entire situation, where the scarce trees of the suburbs turn into an enchanted forest, inhabited by nymphs and sirens that entice the lost wanderer? Or perhaps he wishes to check whether art will pass the test of the moment when the creative process is overtly entangled in questions of desire and the work is born out of the convergence of curiosity and embarrassment? The relation between the artist and the models is presented at the level where money, power and exploitation rule supreme, stripped of bourgeois conventions. Does art have anything to say at this level at all? Brzeski does not provide a clear artistic answer to the above questions. Drawings based on the sketches made in the car give an account of the artist’s experience. These works, like the entire “Shine” show try to look inward, where a self-image hammered by instinct, desire, subconscious fantasies, and nature lurk.

Stach Szabłowski

translated from the Polish by Marcin Turski