Michał Misiak. Simple complexity

The Simple Complexity exhibition will present works from 2022-23, from the latest series 'Frequencies', in which Michał Misiak deepens and nuances his own concept of the non-objective image, which he has been developing for two decades. Lines and the arrangements they create are the constant and most characteristic component of his artistic language. The painter moves in the area of broadly conceived geometric art, reducing the means of expression and at the same time penetrating their potential for interference. In the essence of these creative endeavours lies a kind of 'simple complexity' - a seemingly contradictory tendency to reconcile minimalism (in terms of the formal elements used, the choice of colours, compositional decisions) with the multiplicity and complexity of the structures that appear.

"Optical resonances" that arise as a result of the overlapping of rhythmic yet irregular linear planes lead to impressions of spatialisation, oscillation, vibration. There are many more paradoxes in Misiak's thinking about painting, and it is these that challenge the viewer and determine the cognitive-intellectual, aesthetic, but also emotional attractiveness of the works.

On the one hand, we have a very consistent, measured meditativeness on the other, a sense of movement or non-obvious tensions permeating the visual fabric of the works. The materiality of the painting medium and the desire to overcome it. The perfection of the workshop and the desire to escape the dictates of cold perfectionism. The straight line, but also the effect of a wave-like divergence or convergence that dynamises the individual arrangements. One of the artist's most powerful challenges is to bring the image closer to the abstraction of the music, to create a kind of plastic equivalent for the sensations that arise in the course of listening to contemporary compositional achievements. The temporality of the music, structural consonances and sound qualities seem to be matched here by the thickening and diluting 'frequencies' of the lines, the spatiality and changeability of their interferences, the presence of smoothly interpenetrating structures, and finally the 'dematerialisation of the matter' of painting and the sonority of subtle colour interactions.

27.10.2023 at 6 p.m. - Around the non-objective image and music. Meeting with the artist Michał Misiak preceded by a lecture by Dr Agnieszka Tes and a piano recital by Natalia Sipowicz

Exhibition: 27.10 - 20.11.2023

MOLSKI gallery&collection

Aleja Wielkopolska 65A

60 - 603 Poznań