Krzysztof Biernacki – Places (Miejsca) – 2014

The title of Jacek Mirczak’s exhibition “Miejsca” (Places), is contrary to appearances, ambiguous. The author assumes the absolute superiority of the place over, for example, the situation, but the category of the area refers in his work to the physical location associated with the experience, as well as the place in the artist’s consciousness, where something happens, mediating the shape of art. Emotional survival creates the energy of creation that turns directly to the recipient – a sign that the picture proposes a meeting.

The form of geometrical abstraction adopted by the author expresses non-discursiveness and imprecise relationship with the recipient. One can refer to the original semantic theories of Alfred Korzybski, where man is a form of life, binding time and this is its uniqueness. But there is an internal time (own thinking and experiencing) and an external one, measured in minutes, hours and years. These elements make the reception of art as individual as it is collective, dependent on individual memory and associations, which are merely being abstraction because of their imprecision. Mathematics – as Korzybski wanted – did not find any formulas and it is not known if it will be found. Geometry remains. Mirczak, using it, somehow chooses the struggle for pickup. Attacks the color, the shape of the line. At times he does it brutally, and it does not seem to be a cry for understanding. Similarly to references to minimal art, abstract expressionism or poster poetics, they do not fully explain this work.

The author does not seek to organize the world of abstraction and present it. He makes a kind of deconstruction: the experience penetrates into forms of abstraction, he blows them with the thickness of lines, irregular shapes, asceticism and repetition of colors. In this way, as in the maxim of Tadeusz Peiper: “form becomes content” through emotional overcoming its stiffness, which – according to the great mathematician Kolmogorov – increases the content of the message. Whoever wants can find additional confirmation in Zadeh’s fuzzy set theory. According to Korzybski, perceiving, we choose abstraction, creating a macroscopic object with a limited number of characteristics. These things are directly what Jacek Mirczak’s painting is like: “to create; it does not mean only to produce something that will be called a work of art. There is something more basic, a task much more serious, with the most urgent necessity: to create oneself, overcome formlessness and vagueness of everyday life, gain freedom, sharpness, logical inevitability… “- (D. Bieńkowska” In search of the human kingdom “). Mirczak’s method is direct. Sensitivity should manifest itself directly because it is better than other manifestations.

Krzysztof Biernacki, Warsaw – 2014

The text comes from the catalog of an individual exhibition of paintings by Jacek Mirczak in SH Studio titled “Places.”
Catalog from the exhibition available on the ISSUU platform