Henri Rousseau 'Foret vierge au soleil couchant' (1910)

'When I go into the glass houses and I see the strange plants of exotic lands, it seems to me that I enter into a dream.'

The forest extends, in its centre a dramatic occurrence which despite its character and placement appears only a side event. But what is this jungle, somewhat overly regular and organised like an arabesque or a baroque frame? The frame precisely, it extends further and further. Eventually the trees and other plants, the sun and even the sky form repetitive patterns. There is no feeling of space or mean-ing to the individual elements of the jungle, simply a romantic idea of ‘strange plants’. The ‘entering into a dream’ becomes a distancing act and provides safe passage to the ‘exotic lands’, the lands of the myth, or in other words the ignorant lands of our internal desires. The occurrence in the centre, somewhat lacking details and much of a character becomes its holy grail from an ancient story, ever distant, unknown and framed by history.The Northeaster blows and, once again, history becomes a readymade.

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Here, the usual format of The incredulity of St Thomas is changed to that of a ‘frameless glass’ due to the curators’ decision. This lost frame is, however, simply extended to the further position of the temporal elements – the delicate and impermanent vegetation which like anything else would not be spared by history. The curatorial act establishes a new frame, or extends the frame created by the artist.
The initially found object of the double-glazed glass marked with a black frame brought an obsessive recurring image of Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass. The ‘development’ this time was no different and again ‘recalled’ another image from art history: a painting by Henri Rousseau. This continuous act of extending the historical frame is what the artist describes as ‘history becoming a readymade’, and for the ongoing development of the glass proposes a format of visual recollections of the images of history. The first instance was presented through postcard-sized oil painting copies of historical representations of St Thomas and the second through a single note describing one of Rousseau’s paintings. The function of the language in the note is that of a self-referential and cryptic system, which operates with symbols and symbolic phrases holding specific meanings within this construction.
Nevertheless, the mentioned extension of the frame and its transition from two dimensional into the ‘real’ and the other way around, and then from an initially framed object, to an object framed over, etc. are meant precisely to have the spectator traverse back and forth between various elements, e.g. from the image of a documented symbol (history) to the image of experienced reality (history-forming image), and from a newly created image, back to the glass, which remains at the source, and then, as initially mentioned, back to the initial image of history. All these form ‘rites de passage’ which lay at the base of the creation of the myth.
The northeaster blows, it brings destruction and change. The destruction of the modern discourse and frameworks of existing iconography is brought precisely through this act reestablishing (over and over) of the historical frame, which the temporal and transitory plants reenacting the image of Rousseau’s painting signify.

After the creative act II

This seemingly simple work develops political ideas of Martychowiec through a romantic (concerning freedom and power) approach. After all, the work is titled as being "After" one of Friedrich's masterpieces and so the artist suggest's its significance should be historically as relevant. 

Since 2014 Martychowiec has been operating with unique symbolic language established within several projects. Each element (symbol) represents specific contexts of contemporary, with this work referring to two other bodies of work: "Everything about the contemporary is panda" and "The incredulity of St Thomas".


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Michal Martychowiec