NUIT BLANCHE 2009: PAWEL ZABLOCKI INTERVIEW
Sunday, October 4, 2009 at 8:12PM | Erika Szabo
Fortuny and ArtemisiaWe continue our Nuit Blanche interviews with artist/printmaker, Pawel Zablocki. You can visit his website here.
SHARP OBJEX: When did you first become interested in the arts? Printmaking?
Pawel Zablocki: Like most artists, before I could write, even though I picked up writing quite early… Printmaking occurred later, when I was already in my first year of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow in the early eighties. At first I was attracted by lithography, then I began exploring drypoint and etching and started taking extracurricular classes at the Printmaking Department. Although I graduated in painting my flirt with printmaking proved lasting and evolved into a more serious relationship. What made me delve into printmaking was precisely what I was already exploring in painting: alluding to Renaissance and Baroque techniques by achieving the final result through a build-up of layers—because visual goals I was interested in could be mostly achieved this way. Such approach turned out to be a convenient collusion as this is the very modus operandi of printmaking.
SO: What is it that predominantly fuels you to create?
PZ: The magic of everyday occurrences and the seductive power of etching that allows me to respond to them.
New RunsSO: What are you trying to say with your art?
PZ: I’m telling the story of entanglement of reality with the language of representation. It is my deliberate choice to resort to near emblematic representations—or compilations of those—which are then executed with a technique—an array of tricks, I should say—that creates its own narrative interaction with the representation. This way the properties of visual language come forward and become the protagonists of my prints, taking charge of the way in which my prints can be perceived.
I am primarily interested in the comprehensive exploration of traditional intaglio procedures, aiming to uncover their potential in relationship to contemporary aesthetics. To this end I define my artistic endeavour in terms of the specifics of the techniques I am working with. Having said that, I do not demand that every viewer responds my program—I believe in the viewer’s right to decide what is actually being communicated. Given my iconography, I am satisfied, when my prints are “just” enjoyed as images. While this rationale has been my credo ever since I became aware that art in not just “images”, it’s clearly my studies in Semiotics at the University of Toronto that allowed me to fine tune such awareness. Although I clearly construct my message in the printmaking language, exposing it as an equivalent narrative of the traditionally understood process of representation, I am also aware, that the real message is the one ultimately deciphered by the viewer rather than the one encoded by the artist. And I see no tragedy in such reception as there is nothing wrong with the audience exerting its cognitive pressure on acts of creation it is exposed to.
Giordano Velazquez (full version)SO: Is this your first time at Nuit Blanche or are you a returning artist?
PZ: No, I’ve done printmaking demos during last year’s Nuit Blanche. I enjoyed sharing the delivery phase of my printmaking process with often inquisitive audience, seeing their reactions and thus seeing my work reflected in their reactions. It was wonderful as it is often the case that artists communicate with the audience through finalities: a printed work on the one hand and a response to such a static act. This way the public can often be unaware of the magic of bringing a print to its life, that is the choreographed and spontaneous acts of care given to various parts of the plate in the process of caressing it with the ink, the near painful suspense of running it through the press and the a relief, surprise and joy of the moment the print is separated from a plate. Such magic can be repeated many times in spectacles that reveal the beauty of the uniqueness of each stage of the act.
Leaps...SO: I understand you are affiliated with Open Studio. Could you tell us about the studio and what you do there?
PZ: Open Studio is a printmaking cooperative allowing artists with various degrees of expertise and determination to experience printmaking on levels of enchantment: varying from curious explorer to a believer in the nobility and viability of the medium. We have a commercial gallery and three exhibition galleries; we offer classes for novices and the advanced alike and organize events that increase the awareness of printmaking. As a place to work at, Open Studio conveys a very important message of the often communal nature of printmaking. On a down-to-earth level the Studio provides me with the proper equipment and space to work on my prints as well as with the opportunity to interact with other artists, students and print-curious audience.
SO: How would you describe your creative process?
PZ: On a level of physical execution I make my prints, by scratching into grounded metal plate and use a SHARP OBJECT—what a coincidence with your website! In a broader sense my creative process is an amalgam of the so-called vision and an array of techniques, or even “just” technicalities that afford it. But there is no perfect symmetry in such formula as in principle I see my inspiration (both, perceived and imagined) within the framework of my technical program and the challenges or possibilities visual language offers to my inspiration in the process of reincarnating them as prints.
Regardless of clear referential qualities, directness in achieving a visual goal is not apparent in my prints. It is because in my process of working on a grounded plate I often use mezzotint rockers and roulettes, tricky tools for direct “realistic” drawing as they serve primarily for texturing or preparation of the surface for further reworking. This property, however, allows my ”realistic” imagery to be streamlined into a visual language with apparent parallel traces of tools that seem to have their own life as they often escape the forms they emulate. The consequence is that in the process of perception of a finished print such traces draw attention to themselves as a significant protagonists of the process of representation.
My creative process is fed by the accumulation of bizarre states of reception, in which the linear vocabulary, having presented, or just attempting to present, particular objects refuses to erase itself from the formula of representation and in consequence—significance.
Presentation...(part 3)SO: What current projects are you working on?
PZ: More of the same, but different, as one presumably cannot use the same tool twice… Right now I am finishing my series of nudes based on mostly Renaissance and Baroque classics to be followed by more informal parallel series based on my older and newer drawings. In the larger perspective I am returning to my previous approach of building large compositions out of pieces that interlock technically in a narrative fashion and can also exist independently as in my series “Leaps…”, “Transitions…”, “Runs” or “New Runs” A series of landscapes merging abstract to hyperrealistic modes, where I intend to explore more freely my previous, requiring unforgiving discipline equestrian and nude subjects, is also on the drawing board.
Over the last year I’ve been virtually hypnotized by my studies of Palaeolithic rock art, mostly as it provides excellent opportunity to reflect upon dramatic evolution of modes of representation resulting from mutual feedback between social and technical advances, parallel to what we experience now. Even if you can take time to read, each time you explore a new book those changes happen even faster, what likewise emerges from the most current information on “progress” in art…
Titian Venus (full version)SO: What advice would you give budding artists/printmakers?
PZ: Printmaking can be rewarding to any sensitive artist and thus to the audience even on a very basic, brow-furrowing level of somebody like myself, who has experience guiding artists new to the medium. However, it can be also frustrating as the anticipated end result can be removed not so much because of the time factor, but because of the number of steps, many of which may not point directly in the desired direction. Very much like an outdoor trip cannot follow a straight line to its end. The trick is to realize the beauty of the journey and to find the right mood to enjoy all aspects of the adventure, ideally all the way! To continue with the metaphor of a journey, while the adventure of creating a print can be undertaken in many informal ways, learning from other experiences and reflecting upon one’s own, in order to spend more time experiencing creative interaction with the process, rather than with various time consuming frustrations awaiting along the way, many of which cannot be easily integrated into a creative process.
Cagnaci VenusSO: What areas do you think are still ripe for exploring within the arts? Is there any new territory?
PZ: An easy question for a printmaker: the very techniques of printmaking, specifically intaglio processes, in the context of their well-researched tradition! I consider this by no means an antiquary enterprise as the current, fast evolving art environment affords old techniques equally fast emerging representational possibilities, not considered before, even though at their inception they were technically possible. As an example consider this: the properties of the painting materials in times of de Koonig weren’t that fundamentally different than those in times of Van Eyck, yet the results they arrived at cannot be confused! Printmaking also offers many examples of such possibilities discovered much later within the well known.
Paradoxically, this is a new territory, even before one considers the inspiration coming from other techniques that are close—or not, depending on the ideology—cousins of printmaking, such as the electronic media. I wouldn’t even discuss at this stage the direct interaction between the two, but would merely point out to different ways of thinking that allow crosspollination. Given the dwindling interest in traditional printmaking among the artists, the digital media seem to have the upper hand at the moment. However, as the digital media, thanks to their ease of access, augment the number of visual players, they also increase the audience’s, craving for authenticity which may more than occasionally act in favour of traditional techniques. My formula to be prepared for such opportunities is to stick to my program of meticulous studies of instances of evolution of intaglio techniques as history is a significant source of inspiration. Having depleted many easy to follow books synthesizing the various aspects of printmaking history, I now do this by digging into books focusing on narrow analysis of particular prints, artists and the environments accompanying them. I am not worried about appearing a bit out of touch with the current issues as I live in the same time like those who draw their primary inspirations from the current environment. New territory doesn’t have to be understood spatially, as a place away from the current as it can be a new awareness of the “well known”—and it can amount to discovery…
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