Overgrowth

Overgrowth / Michał Łuczak,  Rafał Wilk


Notes on invisible nature

Silence is not an exceptional state in nature. Most processes that sustain the transition from inanimate matter to life occur noiselessly: photosynthesis in leaf tissues, groundwater movements, nocturnal migration of animals through inaccessible thickets, slow vegetation growth on abandoned slopes and wastelands. This happens constantly, if only given the chance. From the perspective of the existence of life, silence signifies not the absence of events, but the absence of a witness capable of translating these events into their own language. Silence is a margin, a threshold in which the emergence and disappearance of forms takes place without the mediation of narrative. Where humans are absent – physically or perceptually – ecological processes maintain their own rhythm: daily, seasonal, successional. The rhythm of the length of the night, the moisture rising above the water, the heat hidden in the soil, the gusts of wind passing through the blades of grass. In the background of our activities, ceaselessly at work is what could be called invisible nature: unseen not because it is hidden, but because it is not oriented toward us.

And yet there is a certain paradox in this. Any effort to capture what is going on outside of us will always remain a human pursuit. We see what falls on the retina, what is recorded by the matrix, what is reflected in the water. The light refracted in the water vapour above the marsh, the geometry of the reeds leaning out of the water, the brushes of shoots – all this reaches us as an image, though prior to that, and at all times, it persists as a thing in itself, entirely autonomous. The indeterminacy of what grows without our participation is not a problem to be solved. It is a way of being – a profusion of forms that coexist without order, without names, without hierarchy.

The works by Michał Łuczak and Rafał Wilk lead us precisely there – to places where seeing involves accepting that not everything is meant to be grasped, named, or understood.

There is no romantic wildness on the Vistula at night, when the human eye ceases to function. There is only the chaos of receding water, erasing the boundaries between what is air and what has already settled on the ground. There are also animals. They do not pose; they represent nothing but themselves. They become visible when the city lights are reflected in the water and the line of buildings becomes a faint contour in the darkness. This is not nature separated from people – it is nature that exists side by side, in the narrow interstice between day and night, between what is controlled and what occurs on its own, because, after all, it has always happened this way. 

There is a thicket of branches – dry, tangled, forming an illegible pattern against the darkness. Darkness before the branches, and darkness behind them.

In the marshes, among the bushes by the water, on the edges where the earth becomes mud and the mud becomes water, there is a different quality of silence – one resulting not from absence, but from an overwhelming, saturating presence. I watch these places like someone who has walked into the middle of them and does not know where to put their feet, because every surface feels alive. There is no horizon, no sky, no point of reference. Here, everything grows with an intensity that exceeds our capacity to apprehend it. Each stem has its own geometry – there are sharp, thorny, upright shoots; there are springy blades, bent under their own weight; there are branches that grow into tangles so dense they become impossible knots.

Light falls on these forms and does not organise them. It falls on wet clay and flashes back in fragments. It refracts in tiny particles glistening in the water vapour rising above the wetland – in the mist, a state suspended between water and air. It falls sideways on the stems and brings out their colour and character – dark green bends that reveal how full of sap, metabolism and life, in its most basic, unadorned form, they are. They are in the drawings of a preserved summer, when, in scattered light filtered through water, they raised their stalks, filled their leaves with matter, and arranged their fine roots in multiple splits in the soil. The sky enters the water, but not as a reflection – rather as a zone that merges with what lies below. Soil submerged in water, clouds above the water, air saturated with moisture – all this coexists in one image, without any sense of layering.

Plants do not stand in neat lines. Each grows in its own direction, seeking light and space. The shoots cross and overlap, supporting or suffocating each other. There are umbels of dry flower clusters – skeletons of former blooms. There are clumps of grass so dense that the light does not penetrate inside, but slides over the outer blades. What I see cannot be grasped in a single act. There is a frenzy of multiplicity here – forms that do not call for a name, but whirl around and over one another, in a continuous flux of simultaneous growth and decay.

Roots grow into the soil. Water penetrates through layers of peat. Nocturnal animals crawl out of their burrows. Sediment slowly sinks to the bottom. Stems bend under the weight of gathering moisture. All this continues without interruption – not far from here, at the moment when the gallery lights go out and the doors are locked.

Urszula Zajączkowska