Jerzy Świecimski
A landscape, especially when painted directly from nature, not from the recollection and artistic reflection, is a really difficult subject, as it offers the artist a huge variety of sensational information and diverse distractions.
An artist, when not accustomed to discipline of seeing an object painterly (especially in the aspect of compositional rigour) can easily get lost in landscape: he chooses its various elements randomly, adds, mixes and in the end, looses the holistic picture, its leading lines and fundamental sense.
Marek Niedojadlo’s paintings can be treated as an example of something contrary, as very consciously realized discipline of painting vision. They are, at the same time, a direct document to what was noticed in nature (there isn’t any arbitrary fantasizing) and an artistic transformation of perceived reality. “Painting visions”, a document to which the artist’s landscapes are, consist not as much in recording objects, as in noticing a clear formal construction in nature: it is like a natural landscape was a ready-made composition at the moment of looking at it. In Niedojadlo’s work, the whole art of “painting vision” lies only in retrieving this composition, whereas remaking it in a finished work – in proper emphasis and intensification. Autonomous elements of the painting – which can be found in any painting – become, as a result, of double function.
Marek Niedojadlo’s landscapes have got a specific compositive framework. They organize a plane of the painting as a wholeness which is very taut, while this organization refers either to a format of the frame, or to a surface of the work. When you analyze these compositions considering structure, it is very clear that the forms, built in the frame of canvas, always rest on one of the edges; that shifted to an axis – whether vertical or horizontal, but always asymmetrical – create a ground of thickening dominating on the surface. These shifts always have a character of rhythm; they create the wholeness which is consistently assigned to them. Due to that, the paintings seem to be slightly cubistic and nature presented in them becomes a pretext to show a construction which distinguishes itself to the foreground. In some paintings, nature turns only an excuse to showing that construction which, based on a direct perception of nature, indicates it has its origin not in a rational conception of the painting but in nature itself – with the exception of managing to descry it in nature by the artist.
In Marek Niedojadlo’s works, a basing of the composition in the painting plane is shown by the functions of the elements placed within the paintings, usually on the junction of its axes and, mostly, small spots of colour, contrasting with dominating colour range of the painting. Introduction of these points associates with the works which were analyzed as the examples of properly solved compositions in many ateliers of Cracow Academy. These points, regardless of its essential meaning, are of great importance to the composition, even when they are faint in the proportion to the whole painting’s plane. When we look at the painting, covering it with our hand at the same time, its composition falls apart – because something disappears; something that composes an axial element of it; that fixes all the elements to the frame and brings optical order in it. The presence of these axial points is a sign of conscious creating of the composition. Owing to that, Marek Niedojadlo’s landscapes are not only sensitive but, at the same time, well-organized.
The appearance of a young generation artist with such highly well-organized “painting vision technique” on the horizon of Cracow should gladden and gladdens indeed. It shows that painting isn’t – as it is often said to be – a domain solely of sensation and good taste. It may also become rationality. And then, we can state, it is rational art.