What on earth do the Forms contribute to perceptibles, either to those that are eternal or to those that come to be and pass away?1
Aristotle
Visual perception is the ability to recognise, distinguish, and interpret visual stimuli. It is not only the ability to see, but also brain’s processing of the seen. The artists of the 1+1+1 group study the areas of the digital world’s and the standard painting’s exchange.
Przemysław Blejzyk, Łukasz Habiera, and Krzysztof Syruć are part the generation of artists who grew up in the 1980s and the 1990s, the era of rapid development of digital culture: the culture redefining the language of the visual arts. For all the three artists, landscape painting has remained a substantial benchmark. The practice of working outdoors unveils the process of studying nature, which becomes the starting point of analysing and reshaping painting structures within a painting itself.
Their classic artistic education, confronted with new technological possibilities, has directed their search to new visual solutions, where mathematics has become the field of exploration.
Mathematics is the language for characterising the universe. Solving mathematical equations enabled foreseeing the existence of such objects as Neptune, the existence of which has been proved by calculations and not the observation of the sky.
“The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve,” wrote E. P. Wigner in his famous work “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences”.
This evinces itself fully in the works by Łukasz Habiera and Krzysztof Syruć, both architects by education, for whom the structural approach to paintings intertwines with the rigour of mathematical analysis. In the works by Przemysław Blejzyk, an alumnus of the Faculty of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Łódź, in turn, the methods from the field of digital culture occur as a byproduct of both cognitive process and the creative act itself.
Rev. Prof. Michał Heller, a Polish Platonist, has formulated a hypothesis of the mathematicity of the universe, because if the universe were not mathematical “[…] where no norms or patterns applied, or, which essentially is the same, all norms and patterns applied simultaneously, [it] would be ‘torn apart by contradictions’ and would not be able to ‘come into existence’.”2
The information landscape is being flooded with myriads of images created by the so-called “artificial intelligence”. The Nobel Prize winner Prof. Roger Penrose stressed in an interview with Maciej Kawecki3 that these are effects derivative from computational mathematics, which tends to be mistaken for intelligence. Real intelligence derives from non-computational mathematical logic. It is the “non-computationality” that underlies consciousness. All the more, art is “non-computational”.
The artists of the 1+1+1 group have diverted the vector of using digital culture. Their works are like a dialogue between nature and technology. It is not about competition but rather coexistence and exchange. Colours become a field of transmission: a story about the visible and about what is still to be observed. Art brings us back to the living world, to conscious insight. Pixel, glitch, or banding, being the domain of computer technologies, have become a component of exploring the world by the use of colours and brush. The technological and mechanical has become individualised and conscious. Przemysław Blejzyk, Łukasz Habiera, and Krzysztof Syruć are creators operating at the meeting point of intuition, concept, structure, painterly gesture, and digital logic, offering the audience experiencing the world in its non-obvious language.
1 based on Aristotle, Metaphysics,
translated by C. D. C. Reeve, Hackett Publishing Company, Indianapolis/Cambridge, 2016, p. 21.
2 Heller, M. “Czy świat jest matematyczny?”. Philosophical Problems in Science (Zagadnienia Filozoficzne W Nauce), no. 22, 1998, pp. 3-14.
Curator: Agnieszka Bebłowska Bednarkiewicz / NCK
Visual identification: Krystian Berlak
Organizers: MKiDN, National Center for Culture
