Przemysław Jasielski – Drawings of something completely else

Przemysław Jasielski – Drawings of something completely else
Przemysław Jasielski – Drawings of something completely else
Przemysław Jasielski – Drawings of something completely else
Przemysław Jasielski – Drawings of something completely else

Why does Przemysław Jasielski call his elements of machines made from bent paper “drawings of something completely else”? Jasielski (born 1970) is the author of several complicated machines, made according to para-scientific methods, derived from physics, acoustics and optics. The artist’s The Earthquake Control Unit (2004) caused a catastrophy in a gallery. The Unit for the Control of the Earth’s Rotation Time (2003) had a weight elevated to the height of 3 metres to slow down the time of the revolution of our globe by micro-fraction of a second. The Sounds of My Room (2004) is a complicated flower-tending machine. Sebastian Cichocki wrote about these machines that they had left the territory of the scientific fight for usefulness1; although, they still used the terminological and methodological arsenal of the researcher on natural phenomena. Jasielski’s constructions have paradoxically realised the dream to control the untamed power of nature. Yet, the latest works of the artists are completely different. These contraptions have reached the absurd, having been made immobile and encased by frames. Meticulously constructed from bent paper with only an addition of aluminium elements, these drawings are closer to the Constructivists’ reliefs, Malevich’s planits and El Lissitzky’s prouns. They reverberate with the echoes of the Futurist-like respect for the beauty of a machine. His paper compositions of geometrical shapes are subjected to discipline and order. Jasielski calls them “three-dimensional drawings” because a line is not formed by colour but the edge of bent paper. However, the surrealism and uselessness of delicate paper used for the construction of machines is annulled by a huge paper construction, supporting the metal floor of the gallery which is thus “sucked into” the drawing.

*Sebastian Cichocki, Problemy ze skalą. O Earthquake Control Unit Przemysława Jasielskiego, catalogue of the exhibition at Montalvo Arts Center, 2004.

Justyna Kowalska