A Scarred Portrait

The set of pictorial motifs in Michał Wasiak’s artwork is deliberately reduced. The young artist focuses on human beings and the way of presenting them is surprising.

If we were to look for historical sources of inspiration, they would be, on the one hand, classic works by masters of portraiture, and on the other, the 20th century explorations by artists ranging from surrealism to new figuration. The trends dominated by expressiveness, the atmosphere of anxiety and deformation. The art using allusions or symbols stretched between cruelty and ridicule.

In the presented world of paintings and graphics human figures appear – in paintings they are fuller, in graphics they are represented only by heads. Michał Wasiak has no intention to create their academic images. The figures are distorted, their faces are multiplied, twisted, dismembered. They look as if they were scarred. We feel that behind the tissue drawn in this way, which makes identification difficult, there is a true human being, derealised or equipped with mysterious attributes. We need to discover what is hidden behind these incomplete quasi-human forms. Escape from literalism and complex narrative reinforces the feeling of emotional truth. Limiting the range of created motifs, depriving the expression of anecdote does not weaken the message at all. The feeling of deficiency has been compensated with the quality of the painterly image or the perfection of the graphic print.

This can be seen very well in the series of poignant mezzotints. This technique is considered to be one of the most difficult ones and is sometimes used as a measure of the graphic artist’s technical skills. It eliminates linearity, typical of engraving, in favour of the tonal patch, which makes it the most painterly of all graphic techniques.

In the mezzotints by Michał Wasiak, human (and at the same time non-human) heads emerge from a deep backdrop which is a contrast for the whole set of subtle, soft transitions from black to white. They are placed in a space difficult to define, devoid of any characteristics. The substance of the face itself is constructed on the one hand by almost photographically rendered parts of the human body, and on the other by surreal attributes (blindfolds, layers of fibers) or signs (cracks, splits, cavities) of external oppression.

In the case of many artists, the anxieties expressed in this way become a testimony of the search for one’s own identity – personal and creative. They are aimed at understanding oneself and, at the same time, at grasping man’s place in the world which they are part of.

The artist has already experimented with numerous techniques: etching, aquatint, mezzotint, sugar-lift etching or cyanotype. Many works are based on digitally created projects. The motifs observed in nature are subject to the author’s original transformations.

It can be observed that Michał Wasiak looks for suitable tools to convey a certain scale of expression. The artist skilfully uses features typical of a given technique to achieve the intended expressive effect. For example, the ferrotints, in which reflections of human types and situations rather than specific figures appear, are rougher, as if they were subject to stronger surface interference; this creates the effect of indefiniteness and distance.

Like in a poster, the flattened images of human faces emerge from the white background, becoming the signs of human condition, pictorial tools expressing the state of sublimation or decline. Man, deprived of context expressed in details and shown without any signs of specificity and individuality, acquires almost symbolic value.

In visual terms, the works, both painting and graphic ones, create a space for reflection on the formation of form and its deformation, up to the limits of the object’s identifiability. Thanks to the assumed idea imposed on the message, the series of painting works corresponds with the graphic works. In the paintings on canvas, the artist also shapes the portraits of figures - in a series of more varied frames than in the graphics - in order to perform on them an operation of stripping them of both their physical and emotional fullness. The form that builds the human figure is a brilliantly sensed autonomous plastic value. Deformations take place only within the very corporeal matter of the objects, without endowing them with additional symbolic accessories. The series of paintings is very consistent when it comes to the use of light and the choice of colour palette, dominated by red and blue tones.

What strikes us in the works created by the artist is the lack of unequivocally and conventionally expressed emotions and feelings. We have only their signs, their expression. Looking at Michał Wasiak’s works we feel that the search for or definition of identity is always marked with the odium of incompleteness or imperfection. We are aware that in the case of humans it is impossible to grasp what is unambiguous, what constitutes a definable whole.

Dariusz Leśnikowski

Transl. Elżbieta Rodzeń-Leśnikowska