Texts

Agnieszka Tes
Meditation, paradoxes and the sonority of image. About the exhibition Simple Complexity by Michał Misiak (fragments):

"More than two decades ago, Misiak discovered the line for himself. This peculiar, graphic sign of infinity has since become for him an elementary means of expression, a constant compositional component and an object of his painting experiments. The line, usually a straight line, rhythmically multiplied and interfering, enables the artist to transcend the conditions of the changeable nature of everyday perception and move to the level of ideal relations. In turn, the repetitive nature present in the creative process itself, combined with the need to concentrate and restrain expression, leads to states similar to meditation."

"The object of meditation here is not only form, the meaningless play of lines and optical effects created by them. From the very beginning, Misiak has been aiming at a kind of meditation/finding universal principles, in which he seems to be an heir of the 20th-century abstractionists reaching back to the Pythagorean-Platonic philosophy and, through art, referring to the laws of the cosmos. In subsequent cycles of works (e.g. Symmetries (S), paintings marked with the letter Z in the title, or Interferences (I)), there was a clear striving for supra-personal harmony, to express the order permeating the Universe, and an excellent guarantee of the realisation of this aspiration was the use in some canvases of the famous mathematical formula of the golden division and the development of a method of dividing the picture plane on its basis. The ideality of the systems, however, was over time more and more clearly broken by the artist with elements of chance (cycles: Chance (C), Random (R), Fluctuations (F) and a gradual departure from symmetry. The structure of the Universe, he stressed, citing the authority of Michael Heller, 'is all interspersed with coincidences. But their distribution in this structure is not random. They are an essential part of the <matrix of the Universe>"2. From a position of fascination with the Pythagorean concept of beauty and harmony, there was a shift towards inspiration from contemporary physics and avant-garde compositional techniques."

"Not only through a turn towards universal, cosmic inspirations, but also through a fascination with music and a desire to bring images closer to it, Michał Misiak's painting seems to share a certain affinity with the heritage of 20th-century abstractionism. The Krakow artist's stance is also distinguished in this respect by its apparent consistency and aims to deepen and develop it. A general feature of his non-figurative works is a striving to transcend materiality, and it is music, the most immaterial of the arts, that provides an important point of reference in this regard. At various stages of his oeuvre, there were various impulses coming from it that corresponded with his current explorations. At the beginning, for example, it was Bachian counterpoint, a little later - controlled aleatorism, belonging to contemporary compositional methods. However, as the painter himself emphasises, it was never his intention to find "some strict formulas translating compositional techniques into visual form"4 . Nor does he seem to aspire to find plastic equivalents of music; rather, he aims for a qualitative and associative approximation between painting and the sonic universe."

Fragments of the text in the Michał Misiak Simple Complexity, published by MOLSKI gallery&collection, Poznań, 2023.