| From catalogue of an exhibition at the Glaeria EL Art House in Elbląg |
| Emotions, Art, Music |
The multi-directional art of Tomasz Szumiński encompasses many disciplines: sculpture, painting, tapestry making, drawing, ceramics. Additionally, in his artistic career the visual arts combine with music as he is simultaneously an opera singer, endowed with an exceptional bass-baritone voice. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw in 1982 with a degree in sculpture, having studied under professors Stanisław Kulon and Gustaw Zemła. His voice was shaped by professors Jerzy Artysz and Krystyna Szczepańska of the Academy of Music in Warsaw, and subsequently perfected under Maria Fołtyn and Roman Węgrzyn in Poland, and Rusko Ruskov in Bulgaria. At the turn of the 1980s and early 1990s, he performed regularly at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow. Szumiński has always sought an artistic language which would allow him to combine his many interests and talents. He has continues to experiment at the fringes of various disciplines. His many interests and exuberant imagination have not, however, driven him towards the currently popular multimedia art, which often obscures the person with technology. While seeking a new synthesis, he respects lasting artistic values and hides neither his sources of inspiration nor his fascination for artistic individualities. He draws openly upon many genres and directions in both classic and contemporary art, using them to build his own imagined world, singular for its constant breaching of time, space, matter, and sensory experience. His is an endless journey through eras and styles. Fittingly, the Celtic god Lug is the subject of one of his sculptures. God of the sun and lightning, warrior, wise man, wizard, poet, musician, and wielder of many other talents, but above all an inventor and guardian of all arts and crafts. Szumiński's Lug is a contemporary sculptural structure, assembled from a water pump, pipes and a light bulb, which illuminates the entirety of the god's 'head'. Its overstated form, though hinting at the grotesque, does not weaken the monumentalism or inner strength of the figure. The Ghost of Malevich resides at the opposite end of the artist's oeuvre. A reference to Black Quadrilateral, the most famous of Malevich's work/manifestoes, it combines Szumiński's experience in sculpture and tapestry. Looking at this piece one inevitably asks: Does this unusually austere work indicate the road to be taken? Or is it representation of the artist's awarenerss of an unachievable ideal? Szumiński's art, though shifting away from representation towards the abstract, carries such a load of emotion, subtexts, expression and references that acutely minimalist pure forms seem to constitute an ideal. Polyphonies In his work, Tomasz Szumiński closely links art and music interweaving them, passing one through the other. Drawing draws upon romantic dreams of artistic synthesis, he pursues them in his own way. In some works he refers directly to his musical preferences, as with his tapestries and sculptures which bear the titles which of well known arias and songs. At openings, Szumiński, surrounded by these works, performs the corresponding musical pieces: the prologue from Leoncavallo's I Pagliacci, Ernesto de Curtis's 'Torna a Surriento' or the show piece 'Aria of the Toreador' from Bizet's Carmen. The abstract tapestries I Pagliacci and The Spider's Aria are strong for their expressiveness and vibration of color. The tapestry Sorrento (wool, silk, horsehair, steel) is troubling for the rift and shadows which break its fiery surface. These works testify to Szumiński's belief that emotions should have their equivalents in image and sound. At the same time they recall theories - known in earlier and contemporary art and propagated by Goethe and Kandinsky among others - on the relation between the visual arts and music, and analogies between color tones and sounds. Szumiński expresses his musical inspirations in many and various ways. The previously mentioned Torreador is a lone figure of polychrome, welded sheet metal atop a dilapidated cart, which upon closer examination turns out to be a hospital bed. This Torreador far from triumphant, is more readily associated with Don Quixote, the eternal wanderer who battles life on his own. This work clearly possesses a existential subtext and prompts us to reflect on the meaning of our existence. It is a universal symbol for Man's lonely struggle against the adversities of life. Superstar - a collage composition of steel elements on a wooden base - is an icon of contemporaneity. Although geometric and cubist in style, there is no doubt as to its subject - the music idol of our times, the King of Rock and Roll - Elvis Presley. Szumiński's art is polyphonic. This omnipresence of several voices culminates fully in a highly original piece titled Organ, a singular 'juke box' created from an old Dutch bureau. Each illuminated drawer, when opened, causes the 'instrument' to emit one of four sounds as intoned by the artist himself. These sounds are repeated in graphic notation sheets of music: in the bass clef, la and mi of the B-flat scale; in the treble clef, do and so of the scale. The sounds can be of any length, their duration depending solely upon the actions of the listener/operator. From Figure to Abstraction In sculpture, Tomasz Szumiński began with the human figure. His early works in bronze and ceramics are mostly simplified female figures, which emanate eroticism or a sensitivity of motherhood (the artist continues to pursue this vein as can be seen from his small-scale sculptures). He went on to experimenti at the fringes of the figure and totemic, semi-abstract symbols, creating the Phantom series. Initially wooden and ceramic, subsequently made of wood and wool, these compositions and bas-reliefs bear the stamp of the artist's fascination with Miro's magical surrealist painting and ceramic works. Szumiński ended his experiments in this area in symbolic fashion - during a 1997 open-air performance titled The Burning of the Phantoms, he set fire to the ceramic and wooden compositions from this series. As he explains, 'The Phantoms were apparitions called into being by the artist. Only the artist could cause them to disappear.' One of the remaining wood and wool pieces, Phantom no. 5, is included in the present exhibition at the EL Gallery, otherwise primarily composed of Szumiński's new, large scale sculptures created between 1997 and 2001. Some of these works include remnants of the artist's earlier pieces. Orchestra, a high platform pon which small ceramic figures stand as if on a vast stage, echoes his past sculptural ideas. The figures - a politician shaped like an artillery shell, a wind-up singer, a priest, and a violinist - are assembled here in the new configuration of a broken, ambiguous orchestra. The God Lug, a humongous sculpture made of a multitude of parts, includes a much smaller dancing pair cast in bronze, symbolizing the deity patronage of both the arts and love. In the end, love is a mighty force behind both life and art. Szumiński has tried on many occasions expressed this in his sculptures, both those figurative and symbolic and those which tended towards the abstract. Family - made of wood and steel elements - is a reflection on close human relationships. The piece portrays a couple with two children, though the figures themselves are highly stylized. The sculpture is composed of raw lumber and uncut tree trunks of various heights, the only clearly identifiable figure being the woman, whose shapes are suggested by natural outcroppings of branches, a black lace garter belt around her torso. Yet this composition suggestively expresses closeness and sensitivity. The sensual aspects of love, the passion which can link a woman and a man, are embodied in two welded steel sculptures: Courtship and Kiss in a Boat (the latter clearly of constructivist provenance). Szumiński's works derive equally from the strong emotions he experiences and from various references to existing art. It is worth noting that the three sculptures described above are in some way 'ready-mades', and include various 'found' objects. Family is jokingly adorned with the horse-whip that once belonged to the artist's father. Courtship includes the shafts and rods of an engine and the fender of a motorbike. Kiss - which floats in a pool of water - wields a large metal hook. However, in contrast to the accidentally ound objects of Duchamp, which are neutral, Szumiński's ready-mades always bear the mark of emotion. The found objects are taken from his own home or his father's former workshop and are imbued with personal memories and experiences. The same principle was used in creating Don Quixote, a composition of bicycle wheels, brooms and a stylish table. The human figure is lost entirely in this abstract form. The objects, collected and juxtaposed, are mere traces of Don Quixote, an attempt to reconstructing and summoning athe Missing One from memory. Gravitating away from the human figure, Szumiński has turned towards nature. The newest sculptures - his highly transformed Trees - attempt to define anew the relation between nature and artistic endeavor, between the surrounding landscape and its presentation in art. Tapestries Tapestries are just as important as sculptures in this artist's oeuvre. They are a continuation of a family tradition: his mother, Krystyna Szumińska, is also a respected artist and weaver of tapestries. Tomasz Szumiński's first work in this medium was Stage (1987). The exhibition includes more than a dozen of his woven pieces from the years 1987-2000. His colorful compositions combine different techniques (from loom-weaving to experimental collage) with original textures and materials (wool, silk, sisal, horsehair). This variety of means and contrasting forms and materials express his changing moods and strengthen the textural and painterly qualities achieved through the play of light (in Reflection, for example, bas-relief surfaces create geometric, painterly forms). Generally, his tapestries are devoid of figurative qualities. All these works tend towards the abstract, yet their meanings and symbolic subtexts never entirely disappear. They reside at the edge of several artistic disciplines - painting, but also frequently sculpture. ĺwitaniec (an amalgam of words denoting 'dawn' and 'dance') is somewhat like a painting at the same time as it resembles a sculpture. Visible underneath the crude, irregular frame is a layer of wool carpet. Daybreak Dance is the consequence of the artist's processed memories of his wooden Phantoms. A magical object, it is both a sculpted figure and a 'painterly' landscape. Landscapes are the primary association for many of Szumiński's tapestries. This is evident in the symbolically dramatic Promised Land, with its receding horizon as in a realistic landscape, as well as in seemingly abstract pieces like Abyss in Grey (wool, silk, sisal, steel structure), built of geometric planes broken up by an internal play of lights. The same is true of Father's Ghost - an homage to the artist's father. This abstract composition is nostalgic in mood and based on a 'three-dimensional' arrangement of planes and subtle transitions between colors, achieved by placing a thin, painted tulle over a tapestry created using traditional techniques. Szumiński's large tapestries are in essence 'internal landscapes' of spiritual and emotional experiences. While Father's Ghost and Abyss are contemplative in nature, Lava and Morning Apparition, with their heated colors and pulsating forms, evoke strong emotions and passions. The artist's tapestries often evolve over time, modified, often formally transformed, by his experiences and feelings. For example, Fiery Nest - a red tapestry which initially stood alone - was placed with time in an irregular, polychrome steel frame, thus changed from a pure woven piece into a spatial object. Stage evolved similarly. The soft, painterly forms of this tapestry acquired a sculpted wooden skeleton, expanding the possibilities for its arrangement in space. Szumiński's tapestries do not lose their painterly characteristics when gaining sculptural aspects. This serves to remind us that painting (landscapes, portraits, abstract compositions) was a significant stage earlier in the artist's career. Discovering all the themes and moods present in Szumiński's art would require a visit to his home in the neoclassical Regner—wka manor house in the town of Piaseczno and to the adjoining gallery/carriage-house, and a view of the picturesque surroundings. There have been many turns along Tomasz Szumiński's artistic path. As he says of himself, 'Some artists are able to remain in a single, unchanging world. But I never wished to close myself off. I want to go on creating my own world, remaining open to all that surrounds me.' |
| Monika Kuc |
| << WSTECZ |