Out of Love for a Woman
2012
Steel, aluminium, oil paint; 450 × 290 × 350 cm
The sculpture looks like a cloud of hay blown away by a sudden gust of wind. Here, Brzeski undertakes a problem close to the one faced by futurist Umberto Boccioni in the sculpture Synthesis of Human Dynamism, created exactly 100 years ago. Just like in Boccioni’s sculpture, the piece is governed by movement, action, explosion of form developing in space-time continuum. The difference is that Boccioni was looking for synthesis, while Brzeski builds chaos; it is the viewer’s look that organises it into a spectacle. The viewer falls into a trap of delusion set by the sculptor. The polychromed steel rods that the composition is welded from look like whirling stalks of straw forming two figures. The figures are engaged in a fight. But it is not a gentlemen’s duel, but a brutal brawl with the opponent kicked in the head and finished off when he falls down. Ripe ears of corn dangling between the legs are the attributes of male sexuality that fuels the opponents with the energy of aggression. The larger-than-life figures display male virility, albeit fraught with weakness; the wrestlers’ straw anatomy is frail and delicate, and the representation of the fight is only a delusion ready to disappear when the turmoil created by the artist calms down.
Text: Stach Szabłowski / Translation: T.J.
Photo by Bartosz Górka