The issues Paweł Ciechelski is concerned with in his artworks require the use of special language, so subtle as the notion it is to express. It is hard to rationalize them as they come from deep layers of sensibility. Importunate literary approach would deprive them of their solemnity, mystery, of their nobility. They would not sustain narrativity, the excess of imagery elements. The temperate language of geometrical abstraction as the only means of expression would make them in turn far from intimacy, personal commitment, poetry. How to express by artistic means things which as a matter of fact are unutterable, evanescent? How to capture and visualize them? Not only in order to make them a subject of a discourse but also to let them reflect personal experience and views.

Paweł Ciechelski’s artwork becomes a specific lesson on how to pose questions. Questions about the phenomenon of creation, the beginning and the end, duality of things, about the sources of Greek-Roman and Christian Mediterranean culture and about the way it is represented in imagery forms. God-man. The truth and theological virtues of belief, hope and love. The sublime and the sensual.

In his works Paweł Ciechelski always goes beyond the pure layer of form – the message is a carrier of emotional and spiritual content. The language of his art is a set of signs and symbols (archetypes we are aware of ), liberating from visual routine. It makes a coherent whole, not only as far as artistic but also visual and semantic aspects are concerned. The components of the expression are unanimous, they sound in unison.

No matter if the artist uses a chisel or a brush, he penetrates the regions of pure, modest form, often representing aesthetical minimalism typical of the amor vacui world.

The imagery motives emerge from the discreet order of the whole. Forms associated with geometry, yet mostly non-geometrical, staying on the border of abstraction and representational art, convey their semantic meaning, sometimes are revealed in a hint of shape. By their softness, vitality, freedom of shapes, fluency they resemble organic forms – the shape of leaves, twigs, vegetable plaits and grass. Gentle frottage reprints from wooden panels make up a direct trace of biological reality. In sculpture soft stone or wooden forms intertwined together, completed with metal inclusions, seem to be lively sensitive tissue. Placed outdoors, assimilated by moss, they come back to nature.

A part of imagery components, originating from abstraction and reaching the concrete, which is represented by man and human space, is attributed with the religious, mythological or philosophical context. A great number of biblical motives (The Kiss of Judas, Three Crosses, Entombment, Consumatum Est, Shroud Wrapping) and mythological ones (The Birth of Venus) are named. Sometimes more suggestive forms imply a specific image; we can clearly recognize a cross, a shroud, a wing or a cloud.

One of the basic problems considered in Paweł Ciechelski’s works is the phenomenon of creation, the essence of the structure of existence. Therefore there is a lot of dichotomy, moments of transgression in his works. The end becomes the beginning, the infertile season of the year transforms into the spring, the rebirth explodes, Resurrection takes place three days later. The process of creation can also be understood in the context of the artist’s condition and his work – as resuscitating a new value, being an act that bears spiritual meaning.

The very structure of existence (also in the artistic sense) has the oppositional nature. The artist spans the considered problems between the state of perfection and imperfection, finity and infinity, consciousness and unconsciousness. Between black and white, form and its shadow, between the positive and the negative, obverse and reverse, between what is external and internal. The principles of duality rule composition. And the principle of trinity, when the new quality is brought to existence in the dialectical process of synthesis, when in the shape of a triangle the divine power is revealed, and when in the process of incarnation the spirit is embodied into the matter.

Paweł Ciechelski’s exploration, often led simultaneously in different artistic disciplines, is deeply rooted in the tradition of European culture. The motives based on the New Testament, mythology and culture (scenes from the Passion, The Birth of Venus, Anatomy Lesson) are not only a manifestation of man’s personal dilemmas, but also reference to universal, long-lasting painting and graphic art subjects. Paweł Ciechelski experiences and visualizes them in his own way, treading his path – marked with humanism – into the continuum of art.

He acts discreetly and in silence, and in spite of this many paintings come close to the effect of solemnity and monumentality. Silence – an acoustic notion (no sound), which here can also relate to plastic works, is one of the aspects of musicality of Paweł Ciechelski’s artwork. That musicality does not only lie in motives mentioned in the titles: dedications for prominent composers (Lutosławski, Górecki), notions relating to some specific stylistics and genres (Psalm), terms (In Unison), but also rhythms to which imagery elements are subjected and finally that special kind of tranquility that appears when we contemplate the works of the artist from Lodz. The process is accompanied by delicate musical tones; we can almost hear Angel rustle his wing, the hair of Venus flow in the wind, the sheet of shroud slip down the body slowly.

This digression leads us to a wide sphere of sensual values which Paweł Ciechelski’s works evoke. The ones that are very important here are those which relate to widely comprehended space of love, span from longitudinal paintings with shapes making their way towards the edges, vaginal forms, up to the temple of tenderness. The artist aims to regain the mystical, spiritual value of this notion, lost effectively in the contemporary culture (similarly to the way today’s man’s genuine religious sensibility has been subdued).

For the artist, love is undoubtedly one of the foundations of existence, no matter if we consider human passions, eroticism or we identify it with divine feelings and the sacred. In both cases we touch the mystery.

In Paweł Ciechelski’s works various contexts are realized with surprising simplicity by means of abstract yet meaningful forms. Despite ascetic modesty in selection of means of expression, the visual messages act with suggestive power.

Triangular forms resembling wings, boats, with blurred borders accurately define values of objects and space: fullness and emptiness, lightness and weight, materiality and ephemerality, saturation and transparence. It can also relate to sculpture. Combining different materials into unity (though still preserving their distinct features), the artist builds the vision of ‘the whole’, operating with contrasts of solids, their hardness, weight and temperature.

In the works both vast plane splashes (diversified tonally in graphic works, colourfully in paintings), as well as rhythmical linear arrangements (many of them calligraphic in their nature) take part in the play of divisions and convergence of tensions. Movement and rhythm become a determinant of spaciousness. Particularly these shapes which relate to the paradigm of creation, initiation or transfiguration, and diagonal trajectories of their movements solve the problem of space by making an impression of impetus, falling down or emerging from the matter. Some plane forms bend, marking new directions of movement in space as well as exposing the next deep layers of complex reality.

In painting glittering, intriguing, spindle-shaped objects play simultaneously the role of sources of light which glow in the space-emptiness, similar to cosmos. Colour, more often cool than hot, metaphysically mysterious and ambiguous, leaves trails on the surface of a painting. This colourful part of boundlessness, similarly to non-disturbed whiteness of the plane in graphic works, is the most appropriate place to reveal signs of the most fundamental things.

Paweł Ciechelski’s approach is not bombastic. It seems that the notion amor vacui – love for moderation – can be used not only with regard to artistic aspects of his works. We can confidently refer them to the state of specific psychical concentration, uncertainty and modesty, being the background for his existential, philosophical or religious exploration. The artist does not force his ‘only irrefutable truth’ upon us. His attitude is rather marked with humility and being lost. The artist’s work results in a sophisticated reflection, it stimulates wider thought associations.

The area which Paweł Ciechelski explores in his artwork simultaneously becomes the space of cultural universe and the domain of search for his own identity. The author realizes his internal need to find harmony between the universal beauty of art and the individual, not free from cracks, spiritual beauty of man – imperfect and placed merely somewhere ‘in between’.

Dariusz Leśnikowski

Translated by Elżbieta Rodzeń-Leśnikowska