acrylic, collage, canvas, 150 x 95 cm, signed p.d.: 'CZAJ | KOW | SKI | 2021' and described on the back: 'PIOTR CZAJKOWSKI | "LACROIX" 2021 | From the series "METRO"'.
Graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Lodz. Since 1999 he has been an academic teacher at his alma mater. His creative activity is concentrated in the area of painting and drawing. His works are in private collections in Poland, France, Germany, Belgium, Holland, Switzerland and Russia.
The subject of the collection of my paintings, prints and drawings collected under the common title Metro is Paris (...) Of course, Paris is also, or perhaps even primarily, a complex organism teeming with labyrinths of streets, squares and parks filled with residents and tourists speaking all the languages of the world. The depiction of such a multidimensional, such a complex designator required the development of special means of expression, the use of a medium that would allow to convey in the limited space of a flat image a metaphor worthy of such a phenomenon. The articulation of such an expression should make it possible to reproduce both the physical structure of the city and the density of its symbolic space. Since the beginning of the "METRO" series, I have been confronting in the area of painting the expressions of subjective painterly expression with the discipline of the discursive order of the text (...) The title slogan of the series, "METRO," is an important key to understanding the metaphor I have employed, which I call reading the city. I verify this vaguely defined cognitive process in my paintings with a peculiar formal procedure, consisting in the simultaneous invocation of two separate, because flowing from the laws of different languages, syntactic systems. The first organizes the reality of cartographic imagination and the surface map assigned to it, while the second is inspired by the recording of the course of a subway line. The imposition of two orders of notation on the area of one territory, representing different perceptions of space, must also translate into radically different formal means (...) The formal procedure to which I refer to evoke the notational image of this symbolic reality is largely graphic in nature and refers to terms inherent in the language of typographic design. Baseline, ascender and interline are grid meridians repeated in all my paintings and drawings. The oversized division of the area so delineated into still finer rectangular fields, which are like targets for individual letters, functions like a pedantic character counter, in which even empty fields are promoted to the status of spaces (silences), and the boundaries, delineated by the lineage, fold into tabs that define the width and area of what is popularly called the print field. This almost orthodox grid of the column of text, in an attempt to discipline the unruly, striving for entropy of scattered cachet of composition, simultaneously imposes its metre on the entire surface of the canvas or page, making them the image of a page taken out of a default book. In such a view, the question of the side of the big is appropriate, and the surface outside the column of text becomes the margin. A special place for locating comments, reflections and other marginal glosses. This is perhaps the fullest punchline of the metaphor of a subway journey understood as a reading of the city in which the words-names of successive stations are like the titles of chapters that, recalling the reality covered by the vault, replenish its memory with the emotions of reading.
Piotr Czajkowski
author's commentary on the "METRO" series [excerpt].
