Artwork Title: B9
Working in isolation, Wacław Szpakowski made mazelike drawings from single, continuous lines. When he was eighty-five, Wacław Szpakowski wrote a treatise for a lifetime project that no one had known about. Titled “Rhythmical Lines,” it describes a series of labyrinthine geometrical abstractions, each one produced from a single continuous line. He’d begun these drawings around 1900, when he was just seventeen—what started as sketches he then formalized, compiled, and made ever more intricate over the course of his life. His essay is written from the contrived vantage of the third person, betraying an anxiety about his own artistic validity. The drawings, he explains, “were experiments with the straight line conducted not in research laboratories but produced spontaneously at various places and random moments since all that was needed to make them was a piece of paper and a pencil.” Though the kernels of his ideas came from informal notebooks, the imposing virtuosity and opaqueness of Szpakowski’s final drawings are anything but spontaneous or random. His enigmatic process—how he could draw with such supreme evenhandedness, could make his designs so pristine and yet so intricate—is hinted at only in his few visible erasure marks. One drawing reveals two lines bordering the thick final one, a possible clue that Szpakowski may have gone over each design’s path three separate times. These works did not reach an audience until 1978, five years after Szpakowki’s death; today they’re still obscure and easily misunderstood. They’ve crept into exhibitions over the years, but mostly in the artist’s native Poland... ...audiences today may understand the meaning at the heart of Szpakowski’s project better than Rodchenko or Kandinsky ever could. The benefit of seeing art in this post-everything period is that a slew of categories—Abstract? Modernist? Minimalist? Conceptual?—can come together like a poker hand, considered in the palm all at once. When you find out that Szpakowski worked in isolation for three decades, you’re dealt another card: outsider. ...But Szpakowski wasn’t at all provincial. A trained architect who worked as an engineer, he played the violin on the side (he later said his drawings could be used as musical scores). His notebooks are like a twentieth-century version of Leonardo da Vinci’s, with enthusiastic scribblings next to observations of architecture and diagrams of natural phenomena, from ocean currents to fir-tree needles. Szpakowski nurtured this intellectual vibrancy through both world wars; in the second he was an active member of the Home Army, for which he was jailed and his son was killed. In his treatise, he attaches great value to his interest in aesthetics amid such political uncertainty, writing, The very fact of the author’s interest remaining so resolutely focused over the period of many years, the care with which he preserved his sketches through the ravages and challenges of two world wars, suggest that he attached great importance to his pursuits although they might have seemed so trifle in the context of the turbulent historical events that were going on. It is upon the viewer to decide whether the author’s opinion of his linear ideas is justified. Though this text is aimed at an imaginary future viewer, Szpakowski could never have anticipated the particular tensions of the twenty-first-century gaze: our initial suspicion that the designs, for their perfection, must be computer generated; and, upon discovering that they’re not, our fetishizing his hand-drawing technique. Szpakowski took issue, in his lifetime, with the swallowed-whole way of looking that rendered his designs mere decorations, perhaps drawing on older referents like the ancient Greek meander motif or textile patterns. He insists that “a single glance would not be enough,” and that his were in fact “linear ideas,” with “inner content” accessible only to those who follow the line with their eyes on its journey from left to right: a process not unlike reading. [https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2017/02/15/rhythmical-lines/]
Uploaded on Dec 13, 2017 by Suzan Hamer

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