Krzysztof Cichosz (Poland)

Photo-installations (2008)

Programme: Miejska Galeria Sztuki 13 muz, plac Żołnierza Polskiego 2 Thursday (19.03) Start 19:13

Born in 1955 r . in Łódź. Education: Higher College of Photography in Warsaw,  Academy of Fine  Arts in Poznań, 2004 – Doctor of  Art in the Photography (PWSFTviT). Creation in the field of documentary , sociological and creative photography and electronic media. He has developed his own, unique method
of rendering large-format spatial photo-installations   mixing photography with the elements of painting, sculpture and computer technology. He has organised over twenty individual exhibitions, and taken part in over sixty group exhibitions. He is a laureate of a few prizes for artistic and popularisatory activity. He is an initiator and a curator of FF Gallery (Forum of Photography) which has worked in Łódź since 1983. He has been a curator of a few large group exhibitions. He has worked as a lecturer in Higher Film, Television and Theatre School in Łódź. He is a member of the  Association of Polish  Artists
Photographers.

Photo-installations

Krzysztof Cichosz's photo-installations first of all attract with their unusual technique. It is based on breaking an existing picture – just like it happens in modern printing technologies – into a few separate graphical layers rasters, which are recorded on identical sheets of transparent foil. In the exhibition space these sheets are put on one another: they are fixed parallel to a wall, one behind another so that the rasters recorded on them may again compose the original photographic image. However , to see this original picture, to configure or reconstruct it properly in one's look, the viewer has to be in a strictly settled point of space. If he is too close to the photo-installation or he is looking at it from a diagonal perspective, the picture disintegrates into separate layers of chaotic,  rasters of various shapes.
Cichosz's photo-installations are thoroughly discursive: the task of the viewer is to read and develop the narration which is created by putting together a specific picture and the symbolism of  raster creating it – and at the same time breaking it. The sheer technique created by the artist has symbolic meaning. As he points out in auto-comments, the widest, framed meaning of his realisations remains the matter of the inability of constructing by a man the holistic image of the world. This situation exactly – perspectivism and provisionality of our reception of the world, the unintelligible character of fragmentary descriptions, which do not sum up to an organic wholeness – is to be embodied in the structure and played in contact with a viewer of his photo-installations.
Aiming at the holistic image of the world remains an inalienable necessity in Cichosz's opinion. Accepting a humanistic perspective (or a humanologic one) as a still precious, synthetic image of the world, he marks out with his comments a wide variety of issues: from philosophy and science, history of civilisation, culture, art and photography itself, through to important figures, being cultural  icons, past and present political events, multidimensional dangers which are to be brought by the present, to abstract ideas like love, hatred, faith, unity and freedom. With his program he uses prepared photographic
images that belong to the common  museum of imagination. These are single pictures which thanks to social and medial use and abuse became so largely conventionalised that they lost their vivacity and pressure of their inner meaning.
Paradoxically , this fact exactly lets us put in brackets their historic specifics and treat them as an embodiment of some timeless cultural schemes. One may notice then the specific metapictures,  pictures-archetypes: basic cognitive-synthesising and symbolic energies, by means of which a person tries to construct his image of the world. As Cichosz believes that in the times of empty overproduction which reigns nowadays in the sphere of symbolic culture, one should not bring to life other symbolic pictures, absolutely new shapes of timeless pictures-archetypes. One should rather reanimate and reinterpret pictures
already existing to try and save their heritage via a discourse about the present carried out with their help – to extract the symbolic energies they contain and blur . Perhaps Cichosz counts on these processes being initiated by his photo-installation. Quoted by the artist, petrified images are actively reconstructed and resurrected by a viewer , which brings them back the dynamism and dramatism. Through their selection, and marking them with his individual comment coded in the symbolism of rasters, Cichosz asks a question, how far the given traditional pictures-archetypes are still able to synthesise and describe the modern world – how far they let us locate present events in the timeless rhythms of human conscience and culture. The most general reflection that his works may raise seems to be, however , a question whether the perspective of traditional humanism adapted in them still remains a symbolic energy on the present scale or if it needs to be reinterpreted and transformed itself.
Tomasz Załuski