Stanisław Potępa
Between Breugel and de Staël?
That’s the first impression you get. Somebody would snort at positioning Marek Niedojadlo’s paitning between panoramic, almost cosmic landscape of Breugel and de Staël’s landscapes and objects, brought to bright streaks and signs. However, when you experience a greater amount of Niedojadlo’s paintings, such an association doesn’t seem to be without any sense. It is that in Marek’s painting appears, on one hand, invariably huge, panoramic space built-up with heaped layers and consecutive spaces, and on the other hand all the landscape’s elements are brought to the echo of the object, and the light either glows from under the blot, or unexpectedly flashes like a sudden outflow from a hot interior. Besides, even if Marek would like to acknowledge to them, one shouldn’t be ashamed of both great ancestors; these are only distant plates, traces of great convention of aforesaid masters, recast into a completely different painting. Apart from that, these are only some of the conventions which are tested in Marek Niedojadlo’s painting, as this art is in constant movement and permanent development.
Postimpressionistic landscapist?
Marek Niedojadlo’s painting is already so mature that even a discussion among his critics is possible. In a catalogue of an exhibition which took place in “Piano Nobile” Gallery in Cracow in 1996, Leszek Misiak and Jerzy Lubanski agreed that Marek, as a learner of Cracow professors deriving from the trend of colouristic painting, “creatively” and “loosely” expands art of this tradition of Polish painting.
Seemingly, it looks like somewhere in Niedojadlo’s paintings, one could find traces of simplifications of scenic forms, like in Radnicki or Sienicki’s creation, searching for colouristic symphonies of Nacht Samborski or Cybis, but it is also only one, external layer of this painting.
Jerzy Świecimski, in his article in “Tarniny” (9/96), also sees the influence of Cracow ateliers’ school, but he deepens his analysis. He notices the painter’s constructive thought as one of the basic features of this art. He claims that the compositions of Marek’s paintings are based on not big spots of colour functioning on the axis of the plane, “usually contrasting with a dominating colour range of the painting” these points, regardless of its concise meaning, even when they are faint to the plain of the whole painting, have a fundamental meaning for it.” They integrate the whole painting which would fall apart without these small, contrasting elements.
Swiecimski also emphasizes outstanding colour qualities of this painting – vivid, without any indistinct tones and the painting’s surface fatigue with layers of paint, stressing that even bright and decided colours in Niedojadlo’s paintings never become severe paint but are always completed.
The main point in Swiecimski analysis is a thesis that Marek Niedojadlo is a creator with “outstandingly organized technique of painting vision”. He thinks that Niedojadlo’s works are a direct document of what is noticed and, at the same time, very consciously realized discipline of painting vision; that the painter searches for clear formal constructions in observed nature; that the whole art of “painting vision” lies only in retrieving this composition, whereas remaking it in a finished work – in proper emphasis and intensification.
In other words, autonomous painting elements in Marek Niedojadlo’s paintings have got two functions – they “talk about” the reality seen by the artist and the painting itself as an independent work of art.
You could accord with this analysis to a certain degree; however, there is a group of Niedojadlo’s landscapes which have not much in common with “painting vision” of nature. On the contrary, they are a clear creation, just like they were the next stage, but we’ll get to that. Swiecimski analyzed the procedures of Marek Niedojadlo’s paintings’ emergence, method of creation, adding that it is “rational art” but he didn’t make the analysis of what these paintings say and if they present anything apart from the glow of the colour and the play of particular shapes and whole compositions of processed forms. Yet both colour and shapes have got their own expression, something results from the whole play and there is something more in it apart from beauty and pure play.
Expressionist
In my opinion, Marek Niedojadlo is a flesh and blood impressionist. Those, who remember his first series of paintings, created shortly after finishing university, know they were furious, almost devoid of colour, illuminated with streaks of light from the inside of rushed rail carriages with solitary figures, and later, not less dramatic neofigurative characters filled with pain and torn form.
Thus if you remember the beginning of Marek’s art, which not in the least was only a youthful artistic pose, but had a stigma of, almost his personal, drama, you will get the real and the deepest background of his present-day art, which is maybe devoid of youthful extremeness and ruthlessness, but utterly showing his strong emotions.
Emotions, which again and again pushed its way through both those paintings constructed on the groundwork of the landscape, and in clear landscape creation. This expressionism shows itself especially in his latest paintings (years 1997-1998) even more clearly; it explodes with bigger and bigger dynamism of a composition, with loads of pouring, bright colours, flashes of light which hacks through, like hot lava, from under the landscape forms.
A landscape as a metaphor of fate
Marek has been painting mostly landscapes for the last few years. But are these landscapes or pure and simple sceneries?
At the beginning, they were rigorously built landscapes, as if the artist wanted to put classic order into his painting after expressionistic madness. Unshakable, disciplined construction was obligatory in spite of tensions caused by contrasts of lights and ambiguity of forms, which were clearly noticeable. Paintings were built regularly, on a precise, rigid schedule.
However, this rigid, compositional arrangement, as if intruded to bring out of the chaos and against the artist’s world, emanated with drama.
The drawing of slender, nervous trees; plans piling up one on the other as if they wanted to run away and melt somewhere in the light of the sky (?) or rather in the outer space; streams of dramatic light out of this world – all that, despite similarities to the reality, were landscapes already creating the artist’s inner emotions. It seems that the landscape was, from the very beginning, only a pretext. It was one of the visible world’s motives, which were exposed to the purification and the forms “lived” for themselves, to create visional landscape compositions. These landscapes, just like the ones of late Gothic or early Renaissance painters, were constructed of conventional forms; they were turning their own cosmos, another world brought to live completely by the reality. Logic of painting and temperature of emotions ruled this new, landscape world. For example, the painting was built of layers, beginning from the bottom – dramatic redness of the forms (walls, fields, roofs? It doesn’t matter), through ochre, olive and brown treetops, violet and blue fields to the streak of swirled, clear white lights and rich, navy-blue curtain of the sky. And in the middle of all that, there was a flow of light flooding the fields and trees. It was seemingly a landscape, but in fact a poetically painting fantasy, a blood red, replete with colour, interspersed with light fantasy, where landscape forms, brought to painting forms and signs composed less or more conventional spaces, seasons of the year, time of day and night, temperatures.
Finally, they were paintings of some poor world, and through their beauty a clear vision of dramatic and joyless reality shown.
In most of these paintings, in spite of painting richness, precise construction, and great colour play, an impression of the reality’s poverty dominated. Trees looked like they were withered, inserted in dramatic landscape, like they were lonely symbols of some fate. In all of these, there have always been, and still are, places particularly illuminated, like some bright centres, where hope, greater or smaller, sometimes even invisible or sparse in space, trying to run away, is placed.
Thus, apart from being a painting construction, it is also a kind of artistic discourse about the world, human fate which appears in all its beautiful pretences, illusions, calamities and hopes. Painting forms, lights and colours can create these courses and layers of metaphors and meanings in painting and they are noticeable in Marek Niedojadlo’s works.
There are, of course, paintings which are dissimilar, orgiastic, and only beautiful or even sophistically imitating the classical style. But we don’t know how much it is of moving away, in the end everyone has various moods; however, a described genre dominates and in some way documents artist’s constant personality and character.
A landscape continually opened
Marek Niedojadlo’s landscapes are a series of paintings in which the artist tested, and is still testing, various conventions of formal description of landscape shapes. At least several different artistic solutions (apart from those mentioned at the beginning) could be found, but I’ll leave it to the individual entertainment of the audience, in accordance with their knowledge of art.
Enough said the richness of the attempts to solve the convention of landscape depiction in Marek’s output is impressive and is evidence of, at least, two things: search passion and liveliness of the artist who, by trying out, enriches his painting knowledge and constantly develops and deepens his art, which evolves slowly, but continually.
It’s a great pleasure to watch such an artistic evolution which is a result of really hard work. This is an example of the fact that art isn’t dead and it is still possible.
This evolution proceeded more or less this way.
At the beginning, there were direct studies (quite impersonal) of a particular landscape, painted with little interference in a mimetic form, and then processing and transformation of shapes into more and more conventional painting signs started, together with the deepening of colour quality. From time to time, the painter created completely visional paintings on the outline of a landscape. All the time, he tried new conventions and, although discarding them, he would adapt some elements to his, more and more individual painting.
The paintings were more and more picturesque, exquisite, and rich; expression was more and more specific, legible and deep. They have already been first rate works of art. No wonder that he started to draw attention and had his exhibitions in more and more prestigious art galleries in Poland and abroad.
Latest paintings
In recent years (1997-1998) you can find both continuity of Marek Niedojadlo’s art and the next stage in his painting. The drawing of the forms becomes more and more sketch, creating something like a cobweb of solids, but still arranged with constructional precision, despite of the growth of forms’ aggressiveness. Previous, solid stability of the construction is violated by diagonal forms opposing to it, which appear more often.
Colour hasn’t changed – it is invariably bright, differentiated for intensity, built with several layers even within one spot; colours glow and sometimes even shine.
Paintings vibrate with contrastive forms; whole bunches of sharp, tiny, unearthly landscape elements suddenly appear among wide, overflowing, dark and violet shapes. They settle down inside this dark, muffled space and shine, just like night lights.
Landscapes, broken into dozens of tiny shapes appear suddenly and then, in a moment, we have a painting made of a few huge, synthetic planes. It is important that each painting is preceded with a series of drawings of nature and local piedmont landscape; next the artist makes a water-colour version and only then is it moved to canvas. In one painting procedures used by Kadinski and Modrian can be seen, in which they, within few years, simplified trees or objects to a clear, painting construction. This is what Marek Niedojadlo does every time from the beginning and stops at different levels of generalization. Landscape thus becomes a concert of painting forms – sometimes structural, sometimes skeletal, sometimes impressional or urgently moved; colours become more and more abstract and landscape is scenographic, like it was built in a closed space.
All the time you get the impression that it is a play of two realities; that possible mingles with impossible in the landscape.
Marek Niedojadlo’s painting from the last few years is more and more aggressive and urgently moved. Spaces are almost like a whirling universe. Still noticeable construction of a more and more only signalized landscape seems to weigh down under the piles of forms. Drawing of forms, previously seen in these paintings, disappears and space is built almost only of spots. In this series of paintings there are mostly brown, violet, orange and red tones. As it was before, beams of light appear on the horizon, like there was, somewhere in the deep, a secret – if we assume (according to unyielding tradition) that light is a symbol of the touch of absolute.
Marek Niedojadlo’s painting is therefore still evolving and landscape becomes somewhat a metaphor of human cosmos – cosmos which human manages to imagine while being yet another cosmos and living inside nature.
This painting, this landscape is continually opened.