Zachęta Project Room

curator: Magda Kardasz
collaboration: Karolina Bielawska
collaboration on Project production: Agata Skura, Paulina Krzesiak, Joanna Dziedzianowicz, Joanna Domanowska, Magda Kaliszuk

A Smooth Transition from Storytelling to Casting a Shadow is the title of Michał Frydrych’s most recent project for the Zachęta Project Room. The artist has created a Gesamtkunstwerk-type of installation, claiming the gallery’s walls, windows, ceiling, floor and the inner space of the first storey. Onto the black-and-white chequered ornament he has superimposed blue and red oblong forms which, upon closer inspection, turn out to be letters – words – shorter and longer texts. The austere geometry of the background contrasts with the psychedelic softness of the words.

The spectator is literally immersed in language, in sentences, as the artist says, in the ‘total space of text’. Words become a spatial form. In the shapes mounted on the walls or suspended in space an attentive viewer will recognize a narrative. In most cases the texts are sequences of metaphors, an impressional record of the author’s feelings and inner states, and resemble visual poetry, though the artist – the lyrical/painterly subject, as it were – prefers not to use the word ‘poetry’.

The gallery’s interior is lit evenly with intense, cold light, which additionally unifies the space and – paradoxically – causes a hypnotic sense of vibration and unrealness. In an extreme case, one could speak of a complete integration with the work. The artist calls this complex of feelings ‘impressions that you encounter when getting inside an art object, whatever its material form’. Becoming open to the work is the point of departure for absorbing Michał Frydrych’s installation. The next step, according to the author, is to ‘allow the work to enter your imagination’.

Frydrych analyzes the world in its linguistic aspect while noticing also the perceptual power of images. His recent projects skilfully blur the boundaries between the two facets of reality. The show at the ZPR is an all-embracing art form, a sensorial environment. Together with the artist we encourage the viewer to become fully immersed in it, up to the point of achieving a possible altered state of consciousness.

Michał Frydrych, born 1980 in Warsaw, majored in Painting at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts. He studied philosophy at Warsaw University. An Erasmus fellow in Daniel Richter’s studio at the Universität der Künste in Berlin. He lives and works in Warsaw.