Per speculum et in aenigmate
In the catastrophic impact with the rubber wall of late 20th-century modernity, which has sown “destruction” and boundary-crossing in all fields of human creativity, it was the sculpture, more than painting, that suffered the blows of the denial of its entire history, having to reinvent itself completely, including its name, irreversibly “compromised” with symbolism, sacredness, and monumentality. It found itself naked and exposed while traversing avant-gardes and innovations that demanded a new identity, a phenomenon negatively affected by fascism and communism, further distorting its field of representation and presence in architectural and urban spaces.
Michał Jackowski’s sculpture is a narrative of discontinuity. It testifies that there is no linear path of truth in history and that the history of humankind is a story of unpredictability, ineffability, where things happen that were thought to be impossible, and instead, other completely unforeseeable events occur. Within its realm, in its ever-changing course, there is no rigid separation into segments, no history of style, taste, or freedom.
In him, tradition and innovation blend together to expand the linguistic horizon of sculpture. After the exhaustion of monumentality, he has ushered in a new era of architecturality that meets the expectations of an advanced modernity and an increasingly pervasive post-modernity. This shift is repositioning architecture and urbanism, and along with them, the very nature of art itself. It is no longer decorative or confined to tabletops, but instead it exists within our interior spaces, amidst us.
His sculpture, an aesthetic mirror of humanity, is both subject and object, living within the artwork itself, like a secretum. It displays a true spontaneity that stems from being in harmony with oneself, from finding pleasure in self-reflection, self-imagining. Yet, it also embodies the spectacular nature of pleasure, observation, and imagination, engaging in a dialectic between nature and culture. It navigates the clear and the turbid, weaving a combinatory fabric that offers escape and shelter, giving voice to breath, warmth, and a peaceful slumber, as a realm of delight.
These incursions into matter are elaborations of classical, romantic, and post-modern poses. They lean towards ritual, psychology, and sex appeal, blurring boundaries and seeking to embody not only the essence of marble but also the surrounding atmosphere. This essence is constantly redefined by the faces, arms, and hands, navigating between a consolidated sense of common beauty and an openness to the passions of the sublime—something indefinite, unknown, encompassing the immensely grand and the invisibly small. These are all humanistic attitudes that do not disregard the otherness of oneself, existing in a narcissism that has become an automatic dream. However, it is still possible to experience tenderness, to find poetry in everything we see.
Jackowski presents his imaginary universe, composed of human and mythological figures, formal and manipulative games, which define his way of existing as both primitive and advanced in this modernity. He restores the mysteries of anthropology upon the ashes of the necessary explanation of everything, in an hermeneutics that forever safeguards the hidden cipher. The game closes, but immediately after, it begins anew.
Prof. Pasquale Lettieri
Art critic and historian
Academy of Fine Arts of Naples
