Upon trying to struggle through the veil of texts from Władztwo i Służba [Sovereignty and Service] a book by J. Sempoliński I came across a real stumbling block. Traditional explanations failed me. Finally, when I stumbled over the concept of a painting - specter, I realized that paintings and drawings, and their titles make me face some extraverbal, unfathomable mystery. To read the text Ponieważ jestem malarzem... [Since I Am a Painter...] again is no good so I return to the text Nie dążę do żadnej formuły malarskiej, do żadnej w ogóle formuły zdefiniowanej [I Do Not Seek Any Artistic Formula Or Any Other Defined Formula]. I end with the conclusion that "Art is not an expression - art is a journey". Now I know that I must not disregard anything. I find confirmation in an excerpt from Moc przeznaczenia "Verdiego" [Verdi - The Power of Destiny]: "One more issue can be discussed: why the works presented at this exhibition emanate monotony of expression and means. Nearly all pictures are in one tone, nearly all are organized with the same movement of the hand. Yet the world is varied, diverse, yet painting has such diversified means at its disposal! Why deprive it of its richness, why strip it? Well, why?" And in another excerpt that comes from the Ponieważ jestem malarzem... text I read: "If I 'can' do too much - I spoil the painting, I plot what my incapability, my ignorance offers. Therefore my pictures often leave such 'baths' maltreated, half-destroyed, stripped. Possibly empty? Possibly." And after such a dose of quotations I feel blankness, I shrug and suddenly there is a flash: Far East, Ch'an Sect, Haboku style, the Spirit of the Brush...
But on the other - European - hand, Sempoliński deprives the painting's space of the capability of being a subject (which only corroborates his iconoclasm). His painting is not about the work of an eye buy of the mind that captures what is beyond the reach of sight, before sight...
Painting compositions or remnants of the old artistic order can not be verbalized. Human gaze shaped by traditional painting evades forms that are beyond all rules and formulas. It seems that Sempoliński paints in order to be silent, and a word - a title is the last bridgehead of the Logos, and maybe a veil. In Sempoliński's paintings we find the old silence of painting. Silence that can not be verbalized with any explanation no matter how refined. The obscurity of this type of painting bothers, discourages and deprives of any points of support. Sempoliński's paintings imply the expropriation of man from the painting. They seem to be a depiction of some process which fulfills an unfulfillable desire, a desire that is "on its way". Such paintings are beyond meaning, they refuse access to their inside, and become only signals (symptoms) of unconscious though personal energy, being, pure being at the level of the visible, and of the silent. This being is beyond the mimetic space, in the sphere of some preconceptual visual reflection.
No wonder the spirits of Cezanne and of the Chinese painters from the Ch'an Sect waft above Sempoliński's drawing. Sempoliński's paintings and drawings are frozen, arrested energies, visualizations of visualizations, they imply a hopelessness of effort and renunciation, refusal of a tamed work, astray, borderlands…
In short: Sempoliński's painting is a gift - embarrassing and silent, a silence that for some is unbearable.
2002
Władysław Podrazik