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Some Other Artist and his
Wife Against the Background
of My Pretentious Studio,
1987, 181x150cm, oil on canvas
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Sobczyk’s project seen in an attempt of retrospection is a being at the junction of different realities – most often the sign and the word, painting and letter. The word appears with the picture, but the word is never the picture. And if it is, it is a picture of the word. “The area between the word and the picture – writes Sobczyk – is the area in which painting turns out to be a very useful medium since it is appropriate and current, the best medium of the visual arts.
Perhaps to a large extent due to the fact that painting is so heavily experienced and historically burdened; it was so omnipresent in the past that it should not exist any more today. This is what the attractiveness of this medium seems to be; the world is trying to part with painting, placing it in the bracket of the market, salon and conservatism, but, after all, we devote life to examine the brain and create the project of designed language”.
Sobczyk seems to aim at seeking the image of words, examining the relations between them. Images overlap and intermix. Especially recently this multidimensional structure of reality and its presentation with the use of artistic means has become the basis for creation. Images are generated by the space of uncontrolled hypertrophy of clarity, continuously penetrated by Sobczyk.
An important issue refers also to the image as “the area of risk”. What is the final aim of an image? How does it place itself between aesthetics and metaphysics? Sobczyk’s paintings are worked as if the artist wanted to deprive them of aesthetic independence. Simplifying the form leads to austerity; the elements of sketches, notes, geometric grid patterns used for transferring a drawing to a bigger format are kept. The previous versions of a composition emerge from under the layer of egg tempera, all of the parts of a painting are added with a pencil.
Everything is maintained; there are sort of too many means, but this is how austerity is emphasized. Actually, as he says himself he does not deal with mood in art, but with language which orders things.
Sobczyk has done/is doing gigantic work, also in the physical dimension. Work ethics constitutes an essential element of his artistic attitude, ordering, overworking, an unceasing aspiration for “masterly tradition – tradition of achievement and not conjecture”. In his work the whole intellectual tradition available is worked through in theory and practice. In fact, it is a huge intellectual project – an attempt of the whole.
