...the eighteen scenes forming the Creation of the World cycle in the northern portico of Chartres cathedral, Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling, the medieval manuscripts from Westminster Abbey, seen with the motif of the Creator and His compass, and afterward present in William Blake's work, at the Franciscan Church in Kraków in Wyspiański's stained-glass window God the Father-Let there be..., and... not much else. But how many 'fallen angels', 'crucifixions', 'ends of the world', 'last judgements'?
Somehow it is easier (?) for an artist to relate to God-Man than to God-Creator.
In Agnieszka Kozień's Creation of the World, there is no dimension of incidental adventure. Today's cycle is now the fourth realization. The previous ones were polyptychs, but today we have...
SIX DAYS OF CREATION, six triptychs, six peaceful, 'measured' paintings.
The 'measure' here is the state of compositional balance.
Not so much the principle of the triptych itself, as what is determined in its interior. The 'scene' of each DAY is also an arrangement of three parts, but intended as autonomous, not based on the dimension of its parts, transporting its greatness, its scope, its field of action, onto a plane beside in common space. This unsettling of the triptych is only superficial, for in essence the author builds a triptych within a triptych.
This intention has its reasons, two of them. The first is 'conversation' with the tradition of multi-elemental presentations, of Gothic and Renaissance polyptychs from northern Europe, the Netherlands and Germany. The second reason has its inspiration in the text of GENESIS itself. Here, each DAY OF CREATION has its three scenes. Three works of God fill each of the six DAYS.
Each DAY has its synthesis. It is not the process of creation which is the content here. The world of these paintings is, as it were, a presentation of the fruits of creation. The heavens, earth, water, light/brightness, day and night, vegetation, animals, and we ourselves. The heavens are blue, the earth a plane as yet without life, the waters juicy and deep, clear and saturated with color, similar to 'light'. The light is warm, orange, and comes down from above. The orange, brightened with yellow at the upper edge of the painting, designates direction. It is from there that successive life comes, the sun begins its work, the stars 'fall', the moon brightens the darkness. The earth, the fields, are like a meeting of standing rectangular figures with the sign of a tree, its ideogram, geometry.
... 'Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the sky.'* ... and they come into being in the picture thanks to light-form, which, as a rectangular streak of the same width as the created/painted being, builds a gentle rhythm of verticals and horizontals. The streaks of light in the culmination of their brightness reveal successive created beings. This brightness creates (!)-creates divisions, builds successive compositions. Saturated color, laid down smoothly, without emotion or fireworks of material or gestures of the brush. This asceticism is a characteristic of Agnieszka Kozień's painting, but also a separate decision to give expression, be able to relate to things beyond human measure.
Order, balance, clarity, the measure from which I began, is thus an intention.
Questions of the end of the old and beginning of the new century, the magic of numbers and round dates have become for the directors of the mass imagination an occasion to sow transitory chaos and confusion.
When I look at these pictures, I ask the question: what great hope, near certainty, faith, foundation must one have within, in order not to give in to this?
To be certain-this is art,
to give a moment of rest, give others a little...
... time.
