Program

REINCARNATION OF WHITE LIGHT

Matter and white light are the energy that forms the perpetuum mobile of the universe. Matter, absorption, and emission disperse white light – creating two opposing, mutually attracting poles that, when reunited, create a new life of matter and white light.

Jan Chwałczyk, Notes 2009-2018

Absorption and emission create the energy of the universe.

24 September 2018. (last written words)

Because the problem is that reality turns out to be so crazy that no human language can express it sensibly. Simply speaking, words get trapped in the throat and common sense goes on strike. […] And here, surprisingly, comes the moment when art can offer something. For although it will not help us understand anything better (that is not its task), it has the potential to suggest ways of expressing this strangeness of quantum light. […] Art can help us express our correct intuition that we know next to nothing.

* A. Dragan, “‘Ever since I started to think seriously about art, I’ve realized that light is the element that absorbs me the most’ – Jan Chwałczyk,” in: Jan Chwałczyk. Light. Shadow. Information, ed. Jolanta Studzińska, Sylwia Świsłocka-Karwot, Wrocław Contemporary Museum, Wrocław, 2023.

Jan Chwałczyk (1924–2018) played a crucial role in Wrocław’s artistic community. His oeuvre reflects the most important tendencies in Polish post-war art (conceptualism, mail art, kinetic art or art using the language of geometry).

From 1946 to 1951, he studied at the State Higher School of Fine Arts in Wrocław (today: the Academy of Art and Design) under Professor Eugeniusz Geppert. Throughout over 70 years of his artistic work, he used drawing, painting and photography, created spatial, kinetic and sound installations, and authored publications. Between 1953 and 2018, he participated in almost 300 exhibitions, open-air festivals, symposia and artistic actions, and had more than twenty individual exhibitions in Poland and abroad. His works can be found in many museum and private collections.

***

The study of light and shadow was the main source of inspiration for Jan Chwałczyk’s art, providing a wealth of insights and conclusions concerning colour, the interpenetration of photons, the perception of colour and the shaping of form. For the artist, the wisdom of nature and the extraction of its intriguing aspects became a constant source of attraction and creative motivation. He spent years studying the absorption and emission of photons, which occurs when light comes into contact with matter, resulting in our perception of form and colour. He focused his attention on a phenomenon that testifies to the wave structure of reality, which seems to be at the heart of the existence and functioning of the world.

In his notes, he asked himself: “How to reveal the disinterested, blind and deaf conversation between light and matter?” and stated: “I’ve decided to let white rays of light paint space with color.” The series of installations created from the mid-1960s to 2018 (Reproducers of Colour, Light and Shadow; Self-Portraits and Portraits of Light; This Magnificent Shadow) provide a wonderful answer to the question quoted above, as they assume the form of simple, geometric compositions of screens that serve as the stage for the immaterial and ephemeral interplay of light and shadow, recorded with the subjective gaze of the observer. Chwałczyk’s art objects undergo constant transformation, just like the nature around them. They give the impression of living instruments used to capture illusions and reflect on the materiality of the world.

Jolanta Studzińska

It may be the shortest epic in the universe. The universe is the processes of the functions of matter and white light. Conflicted, they create the energy of space-time.

Energy functions:

– matter:

– absorption ←→ emission

– attraction ←→ repulsion

– white light (electromagnetic waves):

– attraction ←→ repulsion

The energy nexus of matter and white light is the creator of space-time.

Waves with a corpuscular structure form the space-time of the cosmos. The energy of these waves has the property of passing toward matter and returning to a previous state. The alternation of passing from one state of existence to another multiplies their energy.

Let’s take reincarnation as an example. The primary color, separated from white light and its complement, when combined again, will form a complete beam of white colors.

Similarly, lightning – the result of different energy values – creates matter, which again emits colors.

The globe – the matter of matter – has two poles and is an electromagnetic structure of space-time.

In this jumble of thoughts I have described space and myself.

The fact that I am a speck of powerful cosmic forces reassured me.

So I bow to ENERGY, the creator of cosmic events!

A brief moment

a few words

in tribute to ENERGY:

– inedible,

– inaudible,

– unscented,

– invisible,

but painfully noticeable,

its potency indestructible.

Physics and astrophysics have wreaked havoc on the common sense view of the world in the last century. There is no longer an objective, linear time and space. The existence of black holes is accepted. A hundred years ago, Albert Einstein introduced the fourth dimension. Other physicists have added other dimensions. Speculation about other dimensions is no longer the domain of esotericism or psychedelic travellers.

The rise of visual consciousness resulted from the rise of the productive forces. The growing realism of vision, like the development of language, occurs in response to the needs created by the development of productive activity, which takes on ever more perfect and complex forms.

How could an event remote in space (Near Death Experience) and time produce a corresponding psychic image when the transmission of energy necessary for this is not even thinkable? However incomprehensible it may appear, we are finally compelled to assume that there is in the unconscious something like an a priori knowledge or an “immediacy” of events which lacks any causal basis. At any rate our conception of causality is incapable of explaining the facts.

Nothing is disturbed – neither inwardly nor outwardly, for one’s own continuity has withstood the current of life and of time.

The future is dark, which is the best thing the future can be, I think.

(…) wars will break out, the planet will heat up, species will die out, but how many, how hot, and what survives depends on whether we act. The future is dark, with a darkness as much of the womb as the grave.