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Kazimierz
Dzyga
30 years
of painting
A timely notion, to pay
tribute to Kazimierz Dzyga for his thirty years of painting, despite a
passing regret that the woman who has inspired such a large part of his
work is so little present in this exhibition! Be that as it may, this
tribute enables the spotlight to turn once more onto an artist who has
dallied skilfully with success and recognition, without ever losing his
talent along the way.
Of Polish-birth,
Kazimierz Dzyga was born in Germany on 5 January 1945. At a young age he
came to France, where he was educated and then found himself in a variety
of jobs, in particular as barman at a hotel on the left bank of the Seine,
in Paris. It was a haunt of a number of painters in their heyday —
Vasarely, Magritte, Mathieu — as well as some well-known writers. "When I
see celebrities on television whom I well remember serving in the sixties,
I tell myself that my job contributed to the bags they have under their
eyes today!" This familiarity with the art world drew him into painting,
a world he discovered by teaching himself, with a burning sensitivity.
His first exhibition, at Gérard Mourgue's bookshop gallery, was a
success. In the mid-1980s he chose to retire to the Dordogne, where he
has lived ever since.
He
developed apace from 1967 to 1997. Fantasy-dream realist painter, his
early works were based on chromatic orgies and noisy, psychedilc,
Bosch-like ravings, as he plunged his dreams onto the canvas (Slona-Woda).
In the mid-1970s, his palette sobered, drawing away from his surrealist
beginnings to border on the fantastic. No more ravings. He said less,
but better, loud and clear. No more allegory on the canvas. What he had
to say was firmer. The work gained the silence of meditation. Two
remarkable paintings, both from 1981, illustrate this — "Listening to
Silence" and "The Lookout". This slow maturing-mutation happened through
the refinement of material and of colour, blue glowing in all its richness
of tone and hue, counterbalanced by a few simple touches of white.
Dzyga's work then crystallised, with less emphasis on the human form and
more on fantasy landscapes with water, in liquid or vapour form,
omnipresent. Apart from vegetation, life forms were now indicated by
glimpses, by touches of artificial light. But Dzyga's obsession remains:
what is the place of man in the cacophony constantly produced by the
mineral Towers of Babel that inhabit his pictures? The answer lies in the
heart of each of us. Kazimierz Dzyga is an unmoving traveller, who knows
how to take us beyond the tangible.
A. Coudert
February 1998
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