"The artist is, in the most profound sense, an instrument of his work.  He is, as it were, above his work, which is why we can never expect him to interpret his own work.  In giving it shape, he has already performed his supreme act.  He must leave the interpretation of it to others, and for ever."

It is no accident that a presentation of Kazimierz Dzyga the artist has as its foreword some lines by Carl-Emmanuel Jung, the vastly influential contemporary thinker and, more significantly, the pre-eminent psychoanalyst.  The links that exist — and they are numerous and profound — between the surrealist movement and psychoanalysis have been laid bare.  And if Dzyga agreed to let himself be catalogued in terms of "schools" and movements, he would most probably choose to align himself, albeit in all modesty, alongside those who, from Hieronymus Bosch to Salvador Dali and on to the Flemish expressionnists such as James Ensor and Permeke, contribute to and nurture a thousand-year-old tradition of the painter's art, in which the formal and the wildly symbolic come together in a thoroughly workmanlike striving for perfection of "technique".

Dzyga's pictures require no explanation; there is no need to "rationalise": he has no account to render.  The pitiless terrorism of human conscience, the categorical imperialism of our "reason", of our will, would most undoubtedly commit the murder, an irreversible one at that, of what must by definition come to the fore in any work of art — of what can be revealed only if it chooses to be, on the sight-lines of freedom, of respect, of mystery, and of "distancing": in short, like birth.

One could analyse Dzyga's works almost psychoanalytically, because everything is there!  We would certainly learn something of his character.  But Dzyga doesn't paint to tell us about himself.  So nothing more would be revealed about the work he has created in and of itself, totally original in the truth of its own existence and thus totally without condition.  Yes, we could say that the sum of the paintings he shows us resembles the place, redolent of sulphur and burning wood, where the mighty, primitive urgings of Eros and Thanatos symbolically meet and unite — but it certainly does not stop there.

You must allow yourself-as-reason to see, to step back, to put aside the blinkers, to face up like a newborn babe to what will reveal itself only slowly, with compunction and artifice.  As with any artist, Dzyga practises the art of the illusory.  But illusion interpreted is on the path of the veritable Being.

Michel Cahurel, 1969