A Sketch Of An Artist's Silhouette

Destruction is a process which is deeply rooted into the human nature. It exists in parallel with the ability to construct and create, and they both constitute an everlasting cycle. Confrontation between the two, as one becomes the other, same as in case of all the opposites, is a moment in which the absolute truth about the world's order is manifested.

Being denied inclusion into the variety of creation techniques for a long time, destruction was rehabilitated in 20th century. Still understood as an act of devastation it remains on the outskirts of artistic activities. However, the understanding of its dual nature enables us to use it as an act of creation and as a release from under the rule of the false substitutes of reality which reveals the true meaning (Frydryczak, 2002:214).

Greg Brat's works should be analysed in this context precisely, as his art is based around the concept where the idea behind the destruction is to be understood as an act of creation, where through the aggressive influences on the still matter - its fall and disintegration - reveals a new order and shows an entirely new approach to understanding. In this seemingly uncomplicated concept the artist is able to find a wide spectrum of the contemporary dilemmas that appear in the context of a painting as a messenger of transcendental values. At the same time, he emphasises that nothing is able to escape the annihilatory power of time, which sends everything, besides a concept, into oblivion. Therefore, painting is a means of discovery beyond the five senses. It is no longer just an activity on the canvas' surface, but it becomes a gate to the understanding of oneself, to the understanding of the truth behind being a human.

In case of Greg Brat's works we are dealing with the deconstruction of the painting's surface as perceived traditionally. He explores the borders searching for the very moment in which deconstruction becomes the creation, however, not an attempted one, but an incidental one which occurs due to reaching the borders of destruction. It is a moment in which every process which the object has undergone, a piece of art, seemingly returns to square one, while, in truth, it has already entered a different dimension, because the object, as it was, belongs to the past, even though visually it gives the impression of having never been altered. This is the everlasting cycle. The idea behind it is that the artist approaches a pure, white canvas and by the means of destruction and wide variety of activities, which are seemingly non-creative, they destroy the promise of becoming something, only to reach the purity of the initial surface again. However, it is not the very same object it was before, because behind its seemingly unchanged appearances stands the whole process. The canvas might have become pure and white again, but now it is saturated with meaning and emotion which was imprinted on it. This way, what is beyond reach, what is invisible to the human eye materialises in Greg Brat's works and is capable of influencing the recipient.

As we take a closer look at his works, we can see traces of battle with matter, traces of attempts to make it kneel before us, which becomes the sign that the destructive power of time is approaching. The artist is not trying to win with it, they give themselves to it, they initiate its fall, all the time being aware that what they - both the artist and the piece of art - conceived through this act will survive. As he writes himself: 'It is us who are keeping things that are prone to destruction alive. A picture on its own is nothing. It has no message, no form, no colour, no title, it doesn't even have a material form. It becomes something through human experiences, so only because of humans it is able to achieve existence.' (GBRT, 2002:17). Greg Brat's temporal factor is crucial, because only in this context it is possible to reach the absolute destruction (Kołodziejczak,2009:196), corresponding to the material objects exclusively. The artist provides the evidence for the fact that, in our everyday life, the absolute destruction does not exist, because as soon as one thing disappears, the space it left behind is filled by another, in a very linear manner.

The traditions of Strzemiński Academy of Art, the alma mater of Greg Brat were detrimental ones out of the series of factors that had helped the young artist decide on a path in making his art. He comments: 'It was a problem specific to the Strzemiński Academy, where particularly creational traditions reign. The construction of the work and the rules behind it played an important role.' Initially, his feeble expeditions in search of 'a good painting' led him right into a dead end, from where there was only one way to select - the way back. He says: 'I had to go backwards, destroy something so I could be on my way again.

The academy's strong affliction for constructivism and geometrical abstraction allowed deconstruction, but only as a process of subtracting from an entity, never as a technique by itself. Greg Brat remembers: 'A word destruction had virtually no right to exist there. There was only construction and deconstruction, but none of those terms actually allowed destroying something only to build again on the debris.' He started to become fascinated with things that were ugly, malformed, distressed, degenerated. Fascination with what was considered to be a manifestation of a rebellion against the contemporary beliefs on art, those that emerged through its perception by the 20th century avant-garde tradition appeared. Painting of what had a form, informalism and works by Gordon Matta-Clark was what became the inspiration to the artist. The new way of painting he adopted was based on the conviction that destruction is much more, more than construction even, filled with meaning and emotion. ' It's not easy for an artist to destroy their own picture, to do the exact opposite of what they've been taught, to break what they created, something very personal...'

Perhaps, because destruction is nothing and everything can become it, Greg Brat has narrowed (or expanded?) his area of study with a combined process on canvas, where, aside from traditional painting workshop there is also glue, ripping apart, fraying, cutting, burning etc. In the end, it is an activity which balances on the verge of painting and not doing it at all. The first works to emerge were his graduation diploma works, the set 'The myth of the beginning, the myth of the end' (2002). The artist had presented large format compositions, each with its unique colour scheme with powerful colour accents. The pictures were not showing any specific objects at all, but the composition of each piece had been given plenty of thought, each had a purpose, but was full of freedom at the same time. Brat creates with chipping remains of paint, carved lines, and splashes of the painting matter. This is where, for the first time, he uses a painting technique of his own, which he affectionately calls 'terrazzo': crumbles of paint, which peeled off the painting, which can remind one of small pieces of plasterwork, which were reattached to the picture. Each work is different, but they are all connected though the same concept - the concept of destruction. Another set of pieces, 'The dance on the waves' (2010-2015) shares the idea. This time, the format is set as 1x1 meter and the artist experiments on the surface of the canvas. He uses pretty much the same techniques, but this time there is less freedom, the compositions are very simple, almost mathematically calculated. Each picture has a limited colour scheme, which gives an opportunity to the form, which is, even more bravely, leaving the 2D world, so it can pop. The tear which is located in the middle of the majority of pieces is framed with cross sections of the many layers of paint - multiple reincarnations of the painting. This symbolical crevice expresses the fall of the dictatorship of the finished form of a piece of art. The artist hopes that it may be possible, through this narrow passage, to get a glimpse of the place where the destruction and creation meet, the existence of the absolute.

Another factor that played a decisive role in selecting a particular artistic path was the artist's personality and attitude themselves, which were greatly influenced by the subculture of Polish punk rock of the late '80s and early '90s, which expressed a rebellious attitude towards the world order and the 'imprisonment' of a human being. This refusal to accept the denial of the elementary values had become rooted deeply into the artist, only to emerge later in his works, which refuse to accept the traditional perception of the surface of a painting. In 2010, Greg Brat creates a piece for the exhibition 'Punk's Not Dead' (Galeria Zachęty, Lipowa 13, Lublin) which bears the same title. The piece is a sentimental journey to the past and an attempt to reminiscent about the old values. Despite that, however, he should not be percieved merely as a rebel. Each one of us has got at least one thing we refused to accept, because we see it as an attack on our outlook on life or on our hierarchy of values. In case of Tomczyk, it is about the choice he made to stay faithful to what he believed was wrong and fight it, instead of only glorifying things that he accepts.

Brat's works are not just about a certain concept or about searching for the perfect management of the surface sealed by a format. A deep understanding of the world's situation: economical, societal and cultural is being reflected in his works, which are the commentary on all of that at the same time. It is the type of art that reflects on the times it exists in: 'The world is slowly turning to ruin, the destruction is its messenger. My art is a narrative to the time in which I came to live. The western culture reminds me of Byzantium at the time of its fall, the internal conflicts, the struggle for power and for natural resources, fake alliances and bribed enemies, and, what is more, the never-ending stoking up the hunger for all kinds of experiences, which leads to perversion and degeneration. Nowadays, our freedom and our choices are just an illusion, we're only a part of a system which doesn't care about an individual, it can only see the grey matter and manipulates it with money.' Nevertheless, Greg Brat is not a catastrophist, because his reflections are not an expression of his standing, but they result from his everyday observations. What suggests those observations in his works are, analogically, symbols of decay - chippings, scrapes, frayed edges, crevices, which stand for degradation, disintegration, aggression, collapse. Our culture is in a crisis and that is what his next set of pieces, 'Madonnas' (2015 - still in progress) is telling us about.

This time, the artist does not choose a clean white canvas, but stunning pieces of an exquisite painter - Raphael Santi. His depictions of Madonna are beautiful and full of kindness, they glow with faith and personify humility towards life. For Brat, they are a symbol of the mediterranean culture in its most glorious form, when men had discovered their capabilities and made progress facing their limitations. Using the maestro's copies, which he, himself, reproduces on the canvas, he destroys the order by chipping the paint away, scratching the canvas, painting over the figures and splattering them with paint, which creates a distorted sgraffitto. Where there had been the original, there now exists a completely new image, which has an entirely different atmosphere. The Madonnas are no longer beautiful, kind or alluring. They are smiling, but through a curtain of the remains of paint, with sadness, they had been stripped of their dignity, disgraced, as if everything that had happened to the world, every wrongdoing, had happened to themselves - they have been slapped across faces, carved scars adorn their cheeks, their robes are in tatters. Quoting the author of the pieces: 'Those paintings are ugly, even though they were supposed to be beautiful, they are unsettling, even though they were supposed to restore inner peace. (...) It was the next step. I knew I had to do this, that it was time to face something bigger than a clear canvas which was not enough for what I wanted to communicate. At the same time it was probably the most difficult, because each one of those works is like raising a hand against God, but that's how it is nowadays. We spit in His face, because we became vain, unleashed, unsatisfied and we still want more.'

Greg Brat's paintings are not a hedonistic 'Because!', a destruction on call or a destruction in the heat of the moment - they are prophetic, they tell us about a point in our history, when we will be forced to destroy everything that remains and begin once again, to build a new temple of truth on the ruins of what we had. Surprisingly, even though destruction, disintegration and decay usually evoke negative emotions in the recipient, these works have met with enthusiasm. It may be due to aesthetics, too much colour or vitality, but their certain brutality is undisputable. Destruction can be appealing. It is an indication of a classic love towards death: we are scared of it, it is a taboo, because it exists within the culture of life, but on the other hand, we are capable of watching it, flaunting it, we are used to it. The artist says: '(...), however, I realized quite quickly that it is a kind of a aesthetics as well [dirty, chipping picture splashed with paint] and that I will find people who will also like this dirtiness, chippings and despair and that is why rebelling only to create those 'ugly' works will not be entirely possible.' Brat rejects the aesthetic sacrum, leans towards the matter, but it turns out, that the idea of Beauty is so deeply rooted in humans that it is impossible to win against this aesthetic factor in a work of art.

The art of today is revolving around topics so imaginary that it often ends up being disconnected not only from the recipient, but also from the surrounding world. As Stefan Morawski has written: 'Art can give the artist a sense of self-salvation as their own existential project. It is not, however, capable of standing against the whole civilizational-cultural shock, which is experienced by the whole humanity nowadays.' (Morawski, 1985:225) Greg Brat's art is his personal record of a picture of the present times, where one needs to 'constantly retrieve the new existence from the chaos of the yesterday' (GBRT, 2002:20). He is also interested in an attempt to destroy a painting, but in a way which would enable him to do it through the painting, as achieved by, among others, Pollock. At the same time he remains one of the few artists in Poland who work with the concept of the destruction as a process and as a tool of learning. Now, where art without rules, art which is only a concept, painting without paint, unrestrained by a format or any principle are accepted, Grzegorz Tomczyk's works are another step towards the transcendental. 'You can be searching your whole life. It's possible, that for searching, and for searching only, men decide to live this way, not for any purpose, not always in order to find anything' (Brat).

Text by A. Nowicka, 2016

BIBLOGRAPHY

1. Kołodziejczak A., Zarys problematyki pojecia destrukcji. Dialektyka destrukcji i konstrukcji na przykładzie rozważań Waltera Benjamina i działań ruchu Dada, [w:] Estetyka i Krytyka 17/18 (2/2009–1/2010)
2. Frydryczak B., Świat jako kolekcja. Próba analizy estetycznej natury nowoczesności, Wydawnictwo Fundacji Humaniora, Poznań 2002
3. Morawski S., Na zakręcie od sztuki do po – sztuki, Wrocław 1985
4. Tomczyk G, Destrukcja w malarstwie na wybranych przykładach, praca dyplomowa, ASP Łódź 2002

'Dance On The Waves' Exhibition catalogue

Art has often referred to what undergoes the passing of time, to what is fleeting. Vanitas among the still nature of the 17th century, remnants of matter on human skeletons in the Middle Ages or the Baroque, many times reflected realistically, striking in their appearance.

Today the artists still draw on what´s passing, what´s marked by time and undergoes decay, is ephemeral. Such action may be, however, a kind of construction, with the stress put not on fleetingness but on change, transformation. In such aspect the destruction becomes construction, the emergence of a new order.

The work of Greg Brat deals with such problems. In 1996 the artist graduated from the Secondary School of Fine Arts in Lublin, next he studied at the Arts Faculty of UMCS. In 1999 he learned at the Faculty of Graphics and Painting at the Strzeminski Academy of Fine Arts in Lódz where in 2002 he got a diploma in painting under the guidance of Professor Mikołaj Dawidziuk completed with a screen printing annex in the studio of Professor Andrzej Smoczyński. At present he is teaching drawing and painting at the C.K. Norwid High School of Fine Arts in Lublin. Yet in his diploma thesis he started to look for a painting formula through destruction that denied composition. He wrote, "Following the way art was changing with time one can arrive at a conclusion any human activity in this specific field was based until the XX century on making and improving the already existing rules, no matter what they were like. It was only in the last century that a man understood art can exist without any rules, art can be an idea, painting can exist without composition or paints, unlimited by a format or a rule." The artist created a cycle of works whose surface, completely destroyed, was stuck again, producing a new painting. The artist approaches destruction as a process that leads to something new, when the end becomes a new beginning. His later actions were a continuous development and evolution of the started work. The canvas surfaces were burned, torn and peeled off. New paintings were born out of the pieces, but they were always given an aspect with an aesthetic formula. In these abstractions one can notice the joining lines of particular elements, colourful grounds and clear divisions. The originator writes, "In the 20th century man learned how to break rules, destroy the order in art considered right for centuries. He realized destruction equally to construction is a way to search the truth, it´s inscribed into our nature balancing constantly on the verge and between the opposites of good and bad, between heaven and hell, chaos and cosmos. Jose Ortega y Gasset defined the idea in a most characteristic way, "being ´man´ means being constantly on the verge of not being one, it means being a vivid problem, a final and full of coincidences adventure, a peculiar drama." Next paintings were made by splashing paint over the canvas, differently to Jackson Pollock´s works because Brat was able to control the process of such created composition. In this series paintings of anarchy-associated colours, red and black, were produced. Anarchy, chaos and destruction are terms around which the work of the artist evolves, the creator paradoxically unable to break with the painting tradition and still thinking about construction he´s trying to escape from. Nevertheless, he stays within the aesthetic painting frames.

Text by P. Zarebska - Denysiuk, 2012

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