Penthouse  August 1987  French edition

If Kazimierz had been a writer, he would have invented the writing of colours.  A musician, he would have made the music of sculpture on the bodies of women taut as harps.  In another life he will be all of these, a master of stage direction.

KAZIMIERZ DZYGA  MAN OF A THOUSAND DREAMS

If woman is the painter's landscape of preference, she is first and foremost the work's point of departure.  Is she blond or dark, modest or shameless?  He can no longer be sure.  He knows only that she will be beautiful, with the beauty that fascinates him like some lost sentiment which he finds anew in each painting (though he may not know it yet).  In his mind, a thousand and one loved bodies mingle, to come together in a feast of the senses that is, at least for now, reserved for him alone.  His models pose in a dream of flesh and bone, to leave a profusion of perfumes, of honeyed possibilities, of trails of desire suspended in some seventh heaven.  Like a secret lover, Kazimierz preys on smiles, devours sexes, drinks at vermilion mouths, storing up love's sighs and tear-sealed delights, as his mind bobs at the quayside of all fantasies.  He becomes drunk to the point of ecstasy, one resonant with reds and blues that expire in his hands like brown waves out of the ocean.  This is the moment to paint, the moment of magic.  Kazimierz entraps the universe of feelings in his landscapes, into a fantasy setting to serve as the cradle for the woman who is finally revealed: the chosen one, the woman encountered at the cusp of the eve, before tomorrow and after yesterday, present yet unattainable.  This is the elusive moment, perched atop a parenthesis.  For Kazimierz Dzyga's work is a matter of the moment — it is his vengeance on eternity.

DREAMS OF WOMAN

The artist's paintings tell of woman, and the women listen to the fantasy credo that is his painting.  Translator of the unconscious, Kazimierz Dzyga exorcises all fantasms, mingling women's with his own in orgies of colours and of shared sensuality, smooth, voluptuous, orgasms in cascades, mouths of forbidden savours.  It is a knowing world of endless seduction, of striving for pleasure.  Into his painting, which is pure femininity, the man plunges his desire.  His eyes lead him to the goal of the journey — dream.  He knows he may penetrate the canvas, rape it shamelessly, phallic symbols marking out a path that unites all loved beings.

DRIVING FORCES

Kazimierz Dzyga is a man of ten thousand projects.  No sooner has he started on one canvas than he is dreaming of the next, the sum of his excitement contained, reduced to a format posed on the easel.  He is also a man of ten thousand dreams, of castles in the air.  The imaginary came into being at the same time as he, eager to meet him.  It was his first refuge, peopled by chimeras at women's breasts, elongated sketches edging his sleep.  Once able to paint, he could share, for Kazimierz Dzyga is, in the most vital sense, generous.  A glance at the pictures is enough — nothing is lacking, neither life nor desires, he bathes them in colours, penetrates them with details to make each one its own, independent universe: "Sources of Life", "The Watcher", or "Fusion".

In the beginning is the garden, a shifting land of shades.  Then you enter the cool light of the house, as in a painting by Magritte.  The studio is further in, right down at the end.  By the window stands the easel, ever ready.  There is no problem coming in, indeed everything beckons you towards the woman, as she opens to you two expanses of heaven, the better for you to merge into the background.  And now it is too late to turn round. Kazimierz Dzyga's painting draws you in, troubling, somtimes almost alarming.  Each magical canvas unlocks dreams and releases fantasms like some inverted tornado.  Don't even think of turning away — his painting is implacable and sensitive, just like a woman.  Yet when the embrace relaxes, it allows you to glimpse the softest of paths, welcoming no-man's-lands: a bubble flits by, the chance of a truce not to be missed.  Listen to the musicality of the paintings ("Carbuncle"), the pure opal notes prolonging the symphonic enchantment — brass tones for a head of red hair, an aquatic ballad for a siren ("The Fountain of Desires").  Kazimierz Dzyga paints as the passion takes him.  A woman is enough to generate a background, an entire universe — be she volcanic, offered, falsely modest in silk slippers, woman with generating power: familiar, famished, fantasies and fantasms — riffle through the artist's works like some catalogue of tributes.  These variations on woman are not exhaustive; there remain all those he has not yet painted, who still cavort in the corners of his mind.  Woman breathes into Kazimierz a force that is tranquil yet terrifying, reinforcing his desire for perfection.  He paints to the point where he loses himself.  Sometimes these painted women have no gaze, their entire body serving for eyes, to plunge into without a second thought.  As if entranced, his brush becomes a caress over the curves of hills, passion at the point of a breast.  The frame is misleading — his love knows no limits; he prolongs himself eternally in the next work.  The paintings are mirrors of a transcendance of the day-to-day, which is the artist's main attraction to the habit of sacrificing himself to the women he engenders: his works are works of the flesh, palpitating, to scratch or bite, to love with blows of the eye.  His canvases often reveal an absence, in that there is no woman clearly depicted.  Yet in that case she can be more present than ever, by some odd perversity given away by a revealing title — "Fusion" (1982), or "Cradle of Helios" (1985), hidden temple of an avowed eroticism.  The artist never dreams of his paintings.  His nights are too short, and anyway his dream escapades come to the easel of their own accord without his having to clutter himself with images while stocking up on sleep.  Like all night-owls he recognises true night for what it is, free of all false hopes, the night of snatches of silence, of perfumes revealed.  The geared-down space is his home port.  He has a love for Morpheus's twin sister, the acrobat whore who plays with fire.  But the artist loves day, too, distilling its light to lend him particular colours.  And yet there is, in the artist's life, a secret palce that is neither day nor night.  No dawn, no dusk can yield such skies ("The Fountain of Desires", "Sources of Life") — too precise, too real, they do not exist even in the garden of the imaginary, but come from somewhere inside his head, a very private realm where he roams alone in search of the absolute.  But Kazimierz Dzyga does not spend his life simply painting.  He is at the sharp end of life in all its aspects.  He can become intoxicated with words, using his distillations of images like an elixir of happiness.  He also tends a flower garden, a pure cocktail of happenstance, splashes of colour on the earth's brown easel.  He often remains alone — but when solitude weighs too heavily he creates a partner to play at exploring.  But he needs more: the whole world, to savour its cathedrals of laughter.  Kazimierz has been painting for nearly twenty years now, for better or worse, and it is not his fault if he is wedded to an ardent and insatiable art-form.  He has tender memories of his first works on home-made bits of wood and coardboard — anything would serve for what he had to tell.  His first studio still exists somewhere, under some roof as close as possible to the stars.  There is a garden, with a ladder to reach this secret attic.  The easel has gone, but there remains a painting, fragile and uncertain.  It expects no visit, no look to awaken it.  Tormented by colours, it shows not a woman but a boat that pitches, ever watchful of the voyage between two stretches of sky.  Kazimierz Dzyga's painting contains no element that is not tangible, including the airborne bubbles that are so gentle on the eye.  You could scratch the stones or melt, quick as a flash, into the softness of the silk cushions ("Venus Born of Azure"). Dzyga masters stone with impressive technique.  He tames impatient skies similarly.  If his pictures smoulder gradually, the blame lies with the steel colours that consume space.   Stone, sun, greenery, fire, woman, absence of water or any other elixir of life.  There is no river in Dzyga's paintings, only lakes of dormant waters.  The Fountain of Desires runs dry, deprived of its substance.  Yet the painting is everywhere fluid, like a shiver, tons of water not entirely absent.  Curiously, some of the titles are totally bathed in the invisible liquid ("The Lake Path", " Atlante Fountain").  His painting draws, inexorably, on the springs of dream like a well whose every drop of water could be a molecule of image.

Christiane La Blancherie