Wojna i taniec / Bogusław Bachorczyk

The essence of Bogusław Bachorczyk’s practice reveals itself in a sentence I once heard him say while working on a large wooden object: “There is little sculpture in my oeuvre—true sculpture—because I create most of my spatial works by adding elements rather than subtracting material.” In fact, the principle expressed in this statement applies not only to his three-dimensional assemblages and installations. Bachorczyk’s canvases and drawings also exceed the limits of their own support. He continually discovers new relationships among collage-like combinations of elements, and at times reworks certain motifs endlessly, as if adding successive layers to a world constructed across the span of his entire artistic output. One might even gain the impression that art constitutes a refined form of collecting for Bachorczyk. In such moments, his practice can evoke associations with the modernism of figures such as Georges Perec and Walter Benjamin, who preserved the bourgeois world of the first half of the twentieth century in their writings, revealing both the fetishistic tendencies of the bourgeoisie and its attachment to objects.

Bachorczyk, however, is an emissary from a different world. The material he brings to each new exhibition does not come from salons or antique shops. He feels more at home on the margins of the urban milieu—in its shadowed and hidden places, as well as in the real and symbolic corridors that connect them to other spaces.

From the realm of high bourgeois art, Bachorczyk occasionally borrows formal solutions. Yet the true interests and allegiances of the artist are revealed by the materiality of his works: collages made from photographs cut out of tabloid newspapers, sculptures fashioned from reclaimed wood and metal, assemblages composed of objects cast ashore by the sea. Similar examples abound throughout his practice. As the artist matures, his attachment to beauty steadily weakens, replaced by a growing fascination with the peculiar and the singular. He also places increasing importance on the histories of the objects he creatively reworks.

Bachorczyk naturally thinks in terms of shapes, colours, and lines. Yet his formalism remains haunted by various spectres—including the ghosts of exclusion, wandering, and even war. If the artist revisits works from the second half of the 1990s inspired by Russian ballet, it is no coincidence. Bachorczyk frequently returns to motifs previously explored in his own work, especially those with which it is most difficult, at a given moment, to establish a relationship—one that must first be created (or, at times, one must simply come to terms with the distance). An important category of objects and images that he reworks in his recent practice are those recalling his rural origins. Another comprises works connected to the Polish histories of gentrification after 1989. The artist experiences this process firsthand in Kraków, where he lives in the city centre and organizes Derek Jarman Memorial Garden (Nasz Ogródek im. Dereka Jarmana), an artistic initiative on Czysta Street that is gradually disappearing in the shadow of expensive apartment developments. This is likely one reason why Bachorczyk’s practice seems increasingly drawn toward aesthetics and figures that are at odds with a world dominated by capital and by (petty-)bourgeois norms.

Bachorczyk’s art is queer in at least two overlapping senses. The first relates to its luxuriance and additive character: the artist constantly introduces new elements into his creative world, as though unable to reconcile himself to being “stuck” within a single form, a single artistic strategy, or a single language. In this context, I would describe as queer the need continually to reinvent oneself and the distrust of established conventions of (co)existence and (co)creation. A different, though closely related, understanding of the category emerges from Bachorczyk’s particular sociability—and that of his work. Both in the garden and beyond it, the artist readily engages in close collaborations, and the circle of people close to him and to his practice is distinctly eccentric in the literal sense: far from the centre, especially from those salon-centres that presume to judge what constitutes proper art, appropriate behaviour, or good taste. Even while working within “consecrating” institutions such as the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, Bachorczyk does not play the saint; instead, he allies himself with those who remain in the shadows. He also seeks opportunities to do, precisely in such places, the things he enjoys most—summoning ghosts, or weeding garden beds.

Arkadiusz Półtorak