The Fall of the Man I Don’t Like
2012
Film 16 mm, transferred to HD video; 8’46”
Sculpture: painted steel 270 x 350 x 210 cm
The composition is made of two parts. The first is a film that enables us to look inside the artist’s studio, and still farther, into his thoughts. Immersed in a creative crisis, the artist is seeking inspiration and, pressed by upcoming exhibition, he is not sure what he will do next. He finds a way out of the impasse in the hatred towards an irritating neighbour. He catches himself wishing him death. “What if he had a little heart attack in the rays of the sun”, daydreams the artist, and instead of driving this shameful fantasy away, he nurtures and develops it into an artistic vision. He draws a fall of a disliked man. However, the hand that draws the picture fulfilling the sinister wish does not resemble the artist’s hand. It is a claw-like paw of a monster.
The diabolic character of the hand underlines the Faustian motif of Brzeski’s narrative: the artist regains creative energy but at the cost of walking on the dark side of bad intentions – it is not certain if the emerging drawing is still the work of the artist or perhaps already of the dark forces that he called upon in the moment of weakness.
In the second part, the depiction of the fall of a disliked man becomes a sculpting problem. Bad intention materializes in the form of an installation that, at first glance, looks like the sketch already seen in the film, but this time it is enlarged so that the figure of the dying man takes on natural dimensions. But at second glance, it appears that we do not deal with a drawing at all. The two- dimensional character of the portrayal is an optical illusion which hides the disturbing manifestation of the artist’s wish – first the word became picture, now the picture is transformed into three- dimensional “flesh” of the sculpture, a figure of a man who falls down knocked down by the artist’s dislike.
Text: Stach Szabłowski / Translation: T.J.
Video
Photo by Bartosz Górka