In the Corner / Jakub Czyż

There is no single, model response to a crisis. When it arrives, responses seem to multiply. They react to chaos while also driving it further. If, until quite recently, we were governed by traditional social identifications, today we are governed by their fragile caricatures. In tracing the consequences of the collapse of the function of authority, it has become customary to speak of the response offered by perverse authority: new fathers who have no regard for established rules. Even as they speak of order, they flagrantly violate decorum. This is one response. Jakub Czyż’s painting remains a study of an altogether different one: quiet, solitary, yet no less stretched across the contradiction consuming the subject. No attempt is made to conceal this rupture with the promise of a new wholeness. It must be endured, cornered in a room that is one’s own, yet profoundly alien. For, as Freud put it, “the ego is not master in its own house.”

Instability becomes the new paradigm, both public and private. To this end, poses are adopted that are (almost) impossible to sustain. The relationship between public, external chaos and its internal, private counterpart can be read implicitly in Czyż’s work. Its primary point of departure, however, is an image of the latter.

A man confined to a room stares blankly into a mirror, slides down a wall, lands on the floor like a castaway on the shores of his own psyche, or sits numbly at a table as an everyday object—a cup of coffee—slips from his hand. The psychopathology of everyday life becomes an extraordinary burden. Two of the paintings feature a pose emblematic of Czyż’s work, one that is “(almost) impossible to sustain”: a male figure barely holds himself above a bed, suspended over it by the strength of his feet alone. From the perspective of classical physics, this position is impossible. From the perspective of the contemporary psyche, it is necessary. The bed, that symbol of rest (or, in another interpretation, of erotic satisfaction), offers no place where the subject can finally come to rest, even though it appears to be the ultimate horizon of his expectations. As little, and as much, as that. The famous slogan of the Paris uprising of May ’68—whose caricatured afterimages now reach us with full force—“Be realistic, demand the impossible” should be reversed: we are not being realistic in demanding the possible.

The painter deliberately chooses the body, which he himself calls the “unruly body,” as the principal metaphorical terrain of this psychic battle. This is less a body that no one governs—the claim that someone still wishes to govern us could certainly be defended—than a body without rule, deprived of any overarching agency that might hold the subject together: a body without identification, passive in relation to itself. All that remains to it are involuntary, grotesque acrobatics, lacking any circus flair and, above all, an audience. For the audience, in words attributed to Voltaire, “is too frightened to laugh.” Nevertheless, the painter lets us watch this spectacle in shades of grey. If he is able to paint it, perhaps we should at least be able to look. Especially since, according to the familiar psychoanalytic dictum, “anxiety is the only affect that does not deceive.”

Piotr Wesołowski

The exhibition is supported by the JMS Foundation.