Text of the exhibition catalogue

Palais Bénédictine, 1997

Whenever I see a sky with slouds, my mind turn to Kazimierz Dzyga and I marvel that nature copies so faithfully what this artist give us to look at in his paintings.  Or is it the reverse, and if so does it matter?  What counts is the blue of infinity, the dream-bearing clouds, the space where the look loses itself as it escapes, the world he invents, the breaches he opens in reality.  Space-vapour, space-time, depth which draws the soul between two stones shiny with humidity at the bottom of a rushing stream, on the tracks of a rider riding on the reflections of water.  The blue is where it all happens, where everything begins, everything ends.  In space, is the frozen tals of comets, as on Earth, where glue algæ become green, birth of life, the first cell, the first emotion, vibration, light, drop, breath.  There is, in Kazimierz Dzyga's pictures, this breath of blue, its smoothness and sweetness, a breath of love, vibrant, like him.

All "Dzyga" skies are made of blue, even when it is nowhere to be seen.  Before, after, comes read, profound, savage, incandescent lava from which erupt the whole gamut of oranges, and then the "cheyenne" skies and the shadows in which fire lurks, then green, puis le vert, blacks, reflections, grays, yellows, the whole palette conjugated on forbidden cliffs, two-way mirrors, bottomless wells, minarets that are no minarets, excrescences, arches, bridges, ropeways, buttressing, caverns, rocks, bodies of women immodestly veiled in transparence and light, castles, palaces, obelisks, points of all kinds of arrows raised to conquer the sky.  A sensual breathing, filled with drops of dew, of desire, of expectation, of patience, of cascades.  The artist's brushstroke kisses whoever looks.  The kiss endures through time.  All creation is mysterious.  It only trace is in the intensity of the shock which it will provoke.  Each picture becomes a place of passage, an initiatory quest which projects us into the essential.  From fantastic to dream, from dream to premonition, from premonition to this reality recreated which becomes more real than the real.

Then there is ineffable smile of the blue rocks, the curves and the temptations which they distil, which they conceal.  The serenity of the gorges, the crevices, the interstices where all the details are worked, gouged out, detailed just like what is in the foreground.  The purple of a woman's throat, when one appears, although less and less in recent paintings, as if the obsession with them has been obliterated, dissolved in the fog.  Vague monsters.  A subtle game of question-and-answer, composition of a labyrinth made of motions, of undulations, of notes held in suspense, each picture its own orchestration of a subterranean harmony which is neither always the same nor always something altogether different, all facets of an interior universe that makes use of the white of the canvas to help us to see the world.

Isabelle Normand, October 1997