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THE MAN WHO PAINTS WHAT HE DREAMS

 

 

Son of Polish immigrants, this self-taught painter has become one of Evreux's best-known artists.  Painter of the fantastic and of woman, Kazimierz Dzyga is to present the first major retrospective of his work.

Self-taught is the right word.  Apart from himself, nothing pointed to Kazimierz Dzyga's becoming a painter.  Polish parents who came to France to find work, his father a farm worker, his mother on a farm at Le Neubourg — hardly a grand avenue leading to an artistic career.  Yet at Vieil-Evreux, where he grew up as one of seven children, he discovered the magic of the paintbrush when very young.  "I made my first paintings when I was 11, with materials I got from my primary school teacher.  They were of flowers.  Later on, I copied some paintings by Van Gogh which I found in a little book my older brother gave me."

He's almost the only one who believes it.  When he was at the Lycée Technique in Evreux, the drawing teacher, Monsieur Guérin, gave him quiet encouragement, although the other teachers sarcastically called him "our artist".  No matter!  Kazimierz continued to paint frenetically, on his own.  As he recalls, "I worked very hard.  My youthful work was tortmented and aggressive.  My first show coincided with the first student demonstrations that led up to the explosion of May 1968, and my paintings reflected that mood."

Part of "le tout Paris"

The apprentice painter from Evreux then found a job working behind a bar in Paris — a significant turning-point in his youthful existence.  The Pont-Royal Bar, where he exercised his talents, was frequented by "le tout Paris" among the artistic and literary set.  Kazimierz found himself serving whisky to the likes of Jean-Paul Sartre, Eugène Ionesco, Serge Gainsbourg, Georges Brassens, Brigitte Bardot, Catherine Deneuve, Françoise Sagan and Jacques Laurent...

"Forbiddingly impressive though they were to me, I learned from the contact with these artists.  I used to dream about their life-style, and I showed them my pictures."  And so it was that, in February 1968, the young man from the provinces gave his first show in Paris, at the De Vinci Gallery.  His young age, just 23, in no way hindered his success.  "I sold well.  There was even a millionaire who bought a picture I had called 'Return of the One-Legged Avengers'!"

This was his painting-as-punch period, which would last a number of years. Dzyga then slid into the manner for which he is best known: lovingly crafted fantasy hyper-realism.  And this time, he was not alone.  People back in Evreux now believed in him.  Pierre Vannier, owner of the Grand-Cerf Hotel, the sculptor Jean Zabukovec whom he met at the Francas', and Jean-Pierre Vidal, with whom he gave summer-camp lessons on the Ile de Ré where he made what was for him a momentous discovery: light.

Stealer of Images

"I'm a sentimental dreamer.  When I paint, my approach is never an intellectual one.  I don't reflect, I simply invent my dreams.  Especially those that revolve around woman.  She is omnipresent in my painting, with all that she emanates — sensuality, voluptuousness.  The painter is a stealer of images.  He ingurgitates thousands of images and stores them in the drawers of his memory, to bring them out again later.  When I see a landscape, I impregnate myself with its beauty, its shapes, its colours — knowing that, one day, I'll put them into a painting."

A perfectionist, Dzyga paints infinitely slowly, no more than fifteen to thirty canvases a year.  Often, he works on them at the same time, moving between them as the inspiration takes him.  This entirely self-taught artist has achieved a prodigious technical mastery of his art.  As he puts it, "Like a musician playing his scales, technique is vital to me.  But it's just the springboard."  Years of labour to achieve these dizzying hues, these unreal lights, this absent-presence that bathes his work, and gives it its dimension of fantasy.

Recognition came about twenty years ago.  Today, , Kazimierz Dzyga has sold a good thousand paintings — both in France, where there are many faithful collectors, and worldwide, particularly in the United States and Japan.  He was given a silver medal at the 1981 Osaka Festival, and a museum in Tokyo selected one of his paintings as the poster for an exhibition.  Figaro Magazine published an article on him, and Penthouse ran a ten-page feature on what it termed this "painter of woman".

A Château in the Dordogne

Together with fame, the painter from Evreux became rich.  He left Evreux and bought a 16th-century twelve-room manor-house in the Dordogne, amid 35 hectares of rural parkland.  A fine move for a farm-labourer's son.  "It isn't the money that interests me, but the dream," he says.  "For me, the château was just like the fantasy palaces in my pictures: I’d been dreaming of it since my childhood."

The dream lasted only a while.  For after the 1991 Gulf War, the art market did a dramatic about-turn.  Times were hard, and buyers bcame cautious.  Prices collapsed, even for favourites.  "Time to reduce dream budgets," confided Dzyga.  He sold his château and moved a few kilometres away to a more modest house — thought it is, as he says, no less of an " extraordinary haven of peace".

In view of the crisis, the artist learned to function differently.  In particular, he decided to devote the same care to small canvases as to larger ones.  "I am showing my respect for my public, offering them works at more affordable prices."

Although smitten by the Dordogne, Dzyga has never cut off from Evreux, to which he often returns for family or artistic reasons.  Just last summer he was the guest of Jean Zabukovec, at the cultural centre in the Iton Valley village of St-Germain-des-Angles, for a superb exhibition of surrealistic landscapes.  Beneath vast skies touched with deep blue, purple and violet, there soar up improbable fortresses, fantasmagorical palaces, luminescent rocks, and lighthouses illuminating the void.  From 13 December to the first of March he presents, at the age of 52, his first major retrospective at the Palais Bénédictine in Fécamp, a bringing-together of 200 paintings, including a number of older ones lent for the occasion by their owners.  A unique opportunity to trace the career of this truly exemplary artist.

Jean-Louis Hartmann, "Evreux Notre Ville", November 1997

 

 

 

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