Genesis reversed

Anna Maria Bielak

Something Strange Happening to My Lawn: here is the exhibition’s title, which is an observation and a confession. Observation, because the painter looks, calculates, recreates and by this he places himself outside. A confession, because he is not afraid to look critically at the lawn which he considers his own and with which he identifies. This is me and my lawn, he says, self-mockingly. This is my world, which is being processed by me before your eyes. The process of creating, integrating the inner and outer artistic views, is cool and emotional. Artistic gardening play has a personal, as well as global, tragicomic dimension. The paradox follows the paradox, laughter echoes across the abyss. Series of paintings by Piestrak forms a story about the present, which we can follow by looking carefully, not only at the painting, but also at what is around it.

The exhibition participant is thrown into a whirlwind of postmodern chaos, the narrative of which is arranged according to the rules of a specific chronology. It quickly turns out that chaos is not the starting point, but the destination. Piestrak's visions go against the canonical descriptions of creation. Here all movement happens in the opposite direction, man is not the culmination of God's work, but its cause, the ungodly homo deus. In this way, he places himself at the epicenter of the history of creation, the original source of which is not chaos, but a pedantic, schizophrenic order.

In the beginning, there was law and order. There was no grass-stalk and no leaf that stood out from the others. All the stalks and leaves pierced out of the ground evenly towards the cold sun, making a beautiful, harmonious line. In the beginning there was a lawn.

The lawn belonged to a man. I deserve some order, he said. I need my piece of orderly world where I can see my beauty. Man needed the lawn.

In the beginning there was a man.

In the world depicted by the artist, man is the starting point and the first cause. The lawn outlines the space of his functioning, at the same time closing him to other spaces. Piestrak's lawn, as probably every lawn, is bourgeois; it is a sign of luxury and excess. It is a space for respecting the bourgeois tastes and the superficial needs of contemporary man. His self can be reflected in the perfectly green, smooth surface of evenly trimmed grass. It satisfies his absurd need for possession.

Contemporary man quickly makes his existence dependent on the lawn through his vanity. Nurturing it gives him a sense of security. I need a lawn to feel safe, he says. The lawn that defines him defines his being in the world. That is why he wants to protect it; that is why he separates his lawn from other lawns. With the help of the lawn, he sets the limits of his being: my lawn, my yard, my four angles, my walls, my fences. He wants to feel good in these spaces; he does not want to worry about other lawns. Other lawns overwhelm him. The other lawns were alien.

The wise thing is to flee from everything to which we do not belong. Keep the good far from the bad, the healthy far from the sick, the living far from the dead, the cold far from the hot, the rich far from the poor.[1]

Enclosed from others, the lawn is necessarily deserted. Its emptiness evokes emptiness inside of me. The greater the attachment to one's lawn, the greater the veiled feeling of emptiness of one's existence. The lawn becomes a sign of nostalgia for the desert. Its symmetry, as beautiful as it is impersonal and bland, perfectly reflects the absurdity of existence. His fierce care and its topographic isolation are associated with the absurd passion of non-existence, with the acceptance of the role that has been assigned to contemporary man. I live because the mountains do not laugh and the worms do not sing,[2] Cioran wrote. At the same time, bees do not pollinate flowers on the lawn, no fruit grows on trees, and no grains sprout underground: there are no flowers, trees or crops. No light illuminated him, no purpose determined his existence. There is no space for life, no space for seeking the depth of existence.

Of what is there, is the airiness, the surface, the intense color. What is there is carefree, surface, intense color. Everything seems to be accessible to the eyes; everything is possible to comprehend with the naked eye. This horizontal dimension is calmingly predictable, to some extent. To some extent, because for Piestrak the lawn seems to be only the starting point for his story, setting the framework in which it is to unfold. The title of the exhibition, as well as the work Something Strange Is Happening to My Lawn, throws us instantly into the unbridled strangeness of the lawn, which has somehow got out of hand, which may be taking control. It turns out that its sterility carries the risk that its stabilization and security are only apparent. What exactly can happen inside, in an empty square of an isolated, sterile space? Piestrak tells us about it in his own way, using his favorite collage technique. He combines heterogeneous, synthetic or recycled materials to violently exploit their organic nature. He plays with the form to draw attention to the content. On cans, he chews away the dead to recover the living. With the help of these treatments, with a mocking smile on his face, he guides us through his story.

The lawn demands to be filled. Bored with its empty surface and its own exterior, a man puts a snowman in the middle of the lawn. The majestic dullard - the snowman - is the perfect toy of the contemporary man, one that will melt before he gets bored with it. Piestrak's snowman (Winter) is made of moons, a game of black and white, light and shadow, the moon and its eclipses. Thanks to this, its makeshift character seems to be doubled indefinitely. Set against the background of a chipboard, the snowman does not exist. There is no sun for him; there is only a total eclipse, the puns of cold, white light and empty, barren darkness that has nothing to do with depth. A snowman is an invitation to play and a warning that play will not last forever, and that it may not be fun at all.

Elsewhere, an old rocking chair is put. Each of us knows this armchair, but hardly anybody still keeps it at home. This archaic piece of furniture openly clutters the space, at the same time exposing what is most occupied by contemporary people: my self, my sense of comfort, security, my fear of sickness and old age. We are a generation of young old men, too tired to take action, too focused on our own depressions and other illnesses to realize how sick our mother, earth, is. This armchair is on fire, but its flames only seem to lick the top of it. There is no inner fire to push to action; there is room for one person only.

Gradually, the lawn turns into a storage room full of common objects, the use of which is impossible to define straight away. Empty, broken bottles - perversely called Tulips by the painter - are waiting in an even row like soldiers getting ready to attack. They could have been filled with life-giving water; instead, they are an invitation to die. In another place - Spring Cleaning - we find a pile of brushes thrown into a ditch. Stuffed on top of each other, shamefully hidden painting tools resemble unwanted, useless or already out-of-date garden tools. The sad blackness of the prints they left on the canvas contrasts with the sunny color that spills outwards. As if they had been gathered in their grave to give way to life, to make room for tools more useful to the world. Hidden for a moment, for the sake of appearance – did you not, painter, bring them back to finish your work?

The storage room is no longer a lawn, but a garden of curiosities, inhabited by hybrids created from the waste of modern times and the matter of nature. The bored king of the lawn could have fun, until the lawn itself objected, until something strange happened ... The lawn transforms, comes alive with a strange gasp. What was dead seems organic now. Climbers and strange creatures swarm from everywhere. The fauna and flora of the garden are peculiar. Sharp thorns prevent access to something we cannot see. Vegetation behaves as if it wanted to signal its bitterness to us: it was a product of the earth, it became its bastard.

Children wandering here and there are basically the only human silhouettes of the landscape. Belonging to both the future and the past, they also fit into the fauna of Piestrak's garden. Children composed of fragments of OSB boards seem to be ignorant, diabolical beings of the future. These chaff figures, gnawed by time, look at us from the painting with curiosity, as if waiting for our move, as if they demanded something from us. They are like bark beetles that dig up the wood without giving anything back, while not realizing that they themselves are of wood themselves and that they are being eaten. The older children of the past are dancing elsewhere. These are no longer made of ecological chipboard material, but of old-fashioned newspaper. They dance, maybe they play cut-outs themselves. In Piestrak's collages, both representations of children are flammable, although only over the others a sinister red flares. Carefree play brings to mind the fools in the Book of Jeremiah: they are like children, if they harm, they do it unconsciously, they should be weeped over; even if their actions lead to a catastrophe. And so they have fun when everything is on fire, while they themselves are on fire. And fire, once again, engulfs only externally. No anxiety burns from within.

An interesting form of a rest from the crypto-apocalyptic vision is choiromyces maeandriformis - Piestrak Edible Fungus. This nice mushroom, a rare white truffle - appreciated by gourmets, but perhaps not liked by everyone - allows you to return for a moment to the world of luxury and excess, which was the elegantly trimmed lawn. There is a lot of it in the painting - fluffy, white shapes do not seem to fit into its frame, as if they wanted to leave it. Outside the green square, its fragments ossify into solid OSB chips. Just like in the painting Something Strange…, fragments of the album are missing; however, bites are not as disfiguring as in the case of toddlers. Also, what deserves attention is that the lower part of the chipboard seems to be taking root, as if the fungus (or maybe Piestrak himself?) was desperately looking for soil in the empty space of the gallery.

Rest does not take long. The magically animated fauna and flora of the garden foreshadow the golem, a symbol of rebirth and decline. Be Afraid is perhaps the most dynamic image of the entire exhibition. According to Jewish legend, the golem was made of clay to serve man. He couldn't speak, but he understood perfectly well. He was enlivened by the letters written on his forehead, signifying the truth. It was enough, however, to erase the first letter for the truth to turn into death and thus for the golem to crumble to dust. For the golem, the process of recreating the cycle of birth and death was inevitable: the golem came to life, served, and grew larger overnight, until man annihilated it by erasing the first letter. There was one, however, who delayed killing the golem, and when he was finally overwhelmed with fear, he was no longer able to reach his forehead. Then a trick occurred to him: he ordered his servant to take off his shoes so that he would kneel and make it easier for him to access the inscription. The trick was successful, except that when the giant golem broke to pieces, his master was crushed by the ground.[3]

How much else can we build on our self-centeredness, before everything turns to death, before we die under the ruins of a forgotten world?

Piestrak's golem wakes up without light; it arises not from earth or clay, but from boxes full of dread, deaf, abandoned by birds and by life; boxes in which we like to hide in spite of everything. He is blind - empty, dead eye sockets are breathing from all sides of the anxiety boxes. It is definitely not a useful golem in Jewish legends that was supposed to support man. He is brittle, crippled, and can barely stand. Structures made of OSB particle boards seem to support it. The Piestrak-Chaos architect is comical, pathetic, and yet terrifying. It is studded with spikes that send a clear signal - I am not your servant but your fear. A peculiar monster devoid of the letter of truth. Even fire, whose artificial tongues roll from the inside and slide down its surface, is not real.

In the hermetic environment of fear for self, the paroxysm of momentary life quickly burns out.

The  flames of  life  burn  in  a  closed  oven  from  which  the  heat  cannot  escape. Those  who  live  on  an  external  plane  are  saved  from  the  outset: but  do  they  have  anything  to  save  when  they  are  not  aware  of  any danger?[4]

Piestrak seems to be saying that the danger is in the air, that there will soon be an opportunity to get to know it. That perhaps for some it has already happened. In the painter's story, man ignores nature, which demands itself more and more bluntly. He seems to be forgetting that his lawn is not just a square of green, that it does not hang in a vacuum, but has been and will always be part of the world. He does not understand that he cannot cover his ground with green strips once and for all, as with insulating tape; he cannot irrevocably possess his own lawn, for even he is not entirely his. The best he can do is place snowmen on it, or stuff useless decorations, waiting for something strange to happen which he would not be able to control anymore. Earth is an element, and an attempt to hide it under artificial, fleeting structures cannot lead to anything but a catastrophe. Then the only clue will be an empty board, which will be in vain to look for guidelines on how to proceed. This table (Official Announcements), as well as the abandoned mask of appearances, can be read as a sign of our future.

An exaggerated vision, one will say, no catastrophe is close to us. We have been waiting for the end of the world for ages, and it has not yet come. We are waiting for it not like the Jews wait for the messiah, but like a nouveau riche for an overdue invoice, which he will settle with one click. Someone else, more sensitive, will quote the therapist: I have the right to focus on myself, I don't have to think about the whole world – he will convince. I do not have to grind the materials just to reveal more layers of chipboard underneath. I don't have to talk about phantasmagoric tools to save the world. There are no such tools; instead it is me, my lawn, my little world, my affairs. Piestrak is aware of this: his visions are laced with self-mockery, and the layers of his multiple realities question themselves. We do not know what is what, what should be treated as a frame and what as a filling, what as a form and what as content, what is nutritious food and what parasitizes freely on the still warm tissues of the Earth. We do not even know what is genuine anxiety, fear for the future, and fetishism in all of this. In this madness, the painter laughs at himself, and we still do not know whether it is laughing or crying. Here we are and our world, he says. Let's laugh together, because it is ourselves we laugh at.

[1] Joao Guimaraes Rosa. The Devil to Pay In The Backlands. p. 318.

[2] E. Cioran. On Heights Of Despair, p. 22.

[3] G. Sholem. On The Kabbalah And Its Symbolism, New York, p. 179.

[4] E. Cioran, ibid, p. 9.