Jarosław Mikołajewski

Here-is-Man Seeks His Homeland

The first time I saw a sculpture by Antoni Rząsa was in Zakopane, in the City Art Gallery, in a cycle of exhibitions of one masterpiece. I remember perfectly well to what I owe the very strong impression which the encounter with the two-headed Christ gave me – so strong that I have been carrying it in me ever since, that I have looked around for Rząsa and seen Rząsa even when he hasn’t been there, like in forests, for instance, and in early Catholic churches, and, despite his seeming absence, I have found him in unexpected places. What defined my attitude to his art was a brief conversation which I had with my own self before the Crucified, a short question and an immediate answer; it was the obvious non-obviousness of the artist, one going straight to the heart. My inner dialogue went like this:

  • Why does this Jesus have two heads?

  • Because generally every man has two heads.

There was no need for further explanations.

I won’t go into why I believe in a two-headed human; that would be about me and I prefer to speak of Rząsa. I prefer to emphasize another aspect of that conversation, contained in a cause-and-effect shortcut: “Why Jesus?” “Because man”.

Not exactly following, but rather together with the great mystics (particularly with Saint Francis, but in a raw version, devoid of the emotional simplicity that the Poor Wretch of Assisi has often been stuffed in), Antoni Rząsa found in the figure of Jesus a liberty to express a multi-shaped, diverse, and emotionally universal human enslavement and burden. First of all, there’s the captivity of the body, its outline which makes us perceive a human as a single-headed creature, and which does not allow the suffering to escape, to break free out of it, out of the nails, cross, log and chains to unpierced air, from the fatal lying down to the vertical or even under ground. Secondly, through the figure of the pained Christ, Rząsa evades the enslavement of style and this aspect should be given more thought, as it is what especially sets him apart from other artists.

The sensation which arises first when we, you and I, look at the numerous works by Antoni Rząsa, is the impression of credibility, or, even more, accuracy. I am tempted to say that each of his Jesuses had been correctly played out, practiced by some moment of suffering of the sculptor himself. This feeling reveals the extent to which the world engaged the artist. His representations include Christs depicting private, intimate moments, probably related to an instance and event, the tale of which might long have been blurred, even in a family’s memory. There are Christs depicting privacy detached from occasion, less of pretext and more related to an everyday insight into the human situation, the potential of sorrow, bottom, despair. There are also Christs displaying the artist’s conscious and strong bond with his generation and nation, such as the shocking and very personal motif of private monuments for the fallen ones in Monte Cassino or Katyń. And it seems that for every figure of pain, individual or suffered jointly, but experienced always in full authenticity and to the very roots of his arteries, Rząsa rejected his previous experience, work instruments, he crossed out his methods, and set anew the Christological history of agony and his own place in it. And that is why, by an endless creating of Christ from the beginning, carving him to the truth of what is intense, Rząsa’s Here-is-Man is so unbelonging that he never stops to seek his homeland. Well, what art, defined by place or style, is Rząsa supposed to belong to? Mountain? Folk? Expressionist? Pious? Isolated? The Italian episode and the relief with which the artist noted that what is left to be depicted had already been portrayed by Giotto and his descendants, would suggest placing him with the Medieval and early Renaissance artists. On the other hand, the relief only temporarily absolved him of expressing human frailty on his own responsibility. As can be found in his notes, it remained in him as a sense of work in the community of artists who hewed to the core, but each in their own corner of a huge workroom. And he did, in this community, not so lonely anymore, return to his own work.

I do not know the definition of a masterpiece, but I feel the time to use the word when I don’t know a better definition of what I see. Sometimes the word just appears on my tongue at the sight of places, people, and animals, less frequently art, and when the moment comes, I have no room for discussion with myself. The word is immense, I shy from using it. But before the Here-is-Man in Antoni Rząsa’s “Homo sapiens” sculpture, it seems inadequate, artificial, made up. Inferior. A man who is a here-is-bull, Jesus-Minotaur, sits driven into his spot on Earth like Dante’s Lucipher thrust into the deepest pit of hell, without any chance of liberation or movement, and he is as much man in his bestiality, as his pain and shame are bestially human. He is so much of wood that he is of stone and soil; the features of his face are so blurred that you can recognize in them the features of any close person, recorded in memory in the moment they were most moved by humiliation.

Rząsa’s Here-is-Man walks the world, seeking his homeland in us, after having found it in his logs and boughs, bent to breakability. And he finds it.

Jarosław Mikołajewski

 

 

 

 

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