The space of the Taïss Gallery is clear, luminous and threefold, spread as it is over three stories. For this exceptional setting, Szajner has conceived a voyage through his work in three stages. We rise from the bottom to the top first of all by color: White, grey and black. The complete opposite of the common wisdom that assumes one crosses darkness to arrive at the whiteness of light. Of course, one can cross in the other direction, the point of departure becoming therefore the point of arrival. An arrival point. Point, as in period. As in: There is no precise arrival, period.
Szajner loves paradoxes and oxymorons : the third stage of the exposition could just as well be called Transfiguration or The Dawn of Darkness. It speaks, as we quickly understand, of « roads to nowhere », of a series of epiphanies erupting all along this course of thought sensations.
On the ground floor, in a white space to which Szajner confers a sense linked to emptiness, to absence, to illusion, a monumental piece imposes itself: Mother. It is an immense letter M, formed by black ribbons that repeat and interweave with each other to trace the outline. At the confluence of this tangle can be read the word Power.
Ensnared by this work, the spectator can worm their way inside and feel as if surrounded, the sheer scale evoking that of childhood where objects and people seemed enormous to one who measured them with the limits of his own body. Mother, immense and strange, Mother phallic in her possession of power. She is at once somber, spider-like and minimal. Her power of suggestion does not pass without reminding one of the monstrous giant metal spiders of Louise Bourgeois which represent, in a curious coincidence, her own mother who was a weaver. Szajner's Black-Mother is also protective and menacing at the same time. Black, because it is the color the artist associates with power, but also because the mother gives us biological life, and therefore death. This is a mother who, as Céline or Beckett would say, gives us life but not infinity. The infinity of language, of course, and of the sidereal spaces that Szajner never ceases to investigate.
A response to this work on the same level: Life, as such (une vie, en soi). « Two blades of light, drawn into a circular saraband, creating luminous, transparent and immaterial patterns... » wrote the artist of this work which he sees as a metaphor for life. Nonetheless, Szajner hints at the possibility of another interpretation.
Attracted by its dark part, the viewer may be fascinated by the opaque section of the work « an obscure territory where no one is obliged to follow the marked path and can create their own light. » To choose beyond "a life, as such", "one's very own life" which responds to the imposing hieratism of Mother with the vertigo of movement. In this way, at the beginning of this journey, two antithetical meanings take shape: To the power of others of which the mother is emblematic, answers the Power of Self, long-lived, persistent and possible... in other words, liberty.
An unparalleled explorer of new media who nonetheless remains faithful to the poetry tied to the materiality of the work, on the first floor, Szajner invites the spectator-voyager to a meeting with the wheels of intelligence of the man in progress. If life was is the incredibly evocative title of a video work representing, according to the artist, the complexity that puts us on the road to questioning. The work is "a forward tracking shot, very slow, into the interior of an immense mechanical assembly which turns, without grinding; an ‘apparently' perfect mechanism..." he writes. Our regard is swallowed by these bluish, metallic gears that desire to attract the spectator's attention to questions like "the perfection of the universe and of our own judgment by the wheels which, on second glance, seem to rebel against any mechanical mind." A succession of lures.
This floor is consecrated to grey, a color which Szajner associates with all that is airy, spiritual, linked to a quest, to a tense attraction towards something, to everything which for man is an internal experience as well as a rising above. In Canto XXVI of ‘Inferno', Danté calls it Transumanar, overcoming human limitations to achieve « virtute e conoscenza ».
Connecting text and image, text and sculpture, At Many No... is an electroluminescent installation in three parts. Three grey pyramids set on the ground seem to engender the curious stem of a flower, the summit of which blooms into a word. Respectively; At, a going towards; Many, a lot, all, the thirst for knowledge being never quenched; No, the third word in this sketch of a phrase which is also the piece and which ends in a curious No. A ‘no' which is one of choice, of free will, ever more affirmed.
The last floor is the black one. For Szajner this is the supreme level because it is by this that one reaches the light. Step by step, one ascends towards the blackness. Beckett's expression in ‘Company', "What visions in the dark of light!" could be the epigraph of the works presented in this space.
La naissance du monde (The Birth of the World), is composed of a small steel cone which emits a twinkling gleam. The spectator who looks deeply will notice an unbearable luminosity at the end. One cannot stare too long at the sun! This blinding follows the hubris of man who measures himself against the light itself.
On the same level, Ran is a luminous and sonorous installation inviting one to dive into what appears to be an artificial representation of nature. Giant vegetation is agitated by a wind that winds through it. Integrating sound like "a supplementary color", Szajner, both a plastic artist and a musical composer, uses sound as a totally separate plastic material, giving it weight and a harsh and profound consistency which develops the space of perception, making it resound, hesitate and evolve in the air. Using yet another language for this title, Ran, means chaos or a lack of order in Japanese. A lack of order that the artist nevertheless wishes to contain within the limits of a framework controlling what is shown and at the same time suggesting the invisible infinity of what is not. The second version of the piece, where light and the absence of color intervene in a different way, creating a tridimensional cosmology, has the most contradictory title imaginable: The Definite Infinity Enigma. The possibility of an infinity that could be "perceptible" to someone, an infinity that would be "defined", contained in a frame.
The pieces in this space are presented under the sign of passage, from the understood transformation to the sense of going beyond the visible. One perception can hide another, form undoes itself to make room for, not an abstract immateriality, but the pure migration of meaning, more ambiguous than ever, more multiple than ever, more than ever in the process of becoming.
Margherita Leoni
Paris, 27 April 2009
Szajner loves paradoxes and oxymorons : the third stage of the exposition could just as well be called Transfiguration or The Dawn of Darkness. It speaks, as we quickly understand, of « roads to nowhere », of a series of epiphanies erupting all along this course of thought sensations.
On the ground floor, in a white space to which Szajner confers a sense linked to emptiness, to absence, to illusion, a monumental piece imposes itself: Mother. It is an immense letter M, formed by black ribbons that repeat and interweave with each other to trace the outline. At the confluence of this tangle can be read the word Power.
Ensnared by this work, the spectator can worm their way inside and feel as if surrounded, the sheer scale evoking that of childhood where objects and people seemed enormous to one who measured them with the limits of his own body. Mother, immense and strange, Mother phallic in her possession of power. She is at once somber, spider-like and minimal. Her power of suggestion does not pass without reminding one of the monstrous giant metal spiders of Louise Bourgeois which represent, in a curious coincidence, her own mother who was a weaver. Szajner's Black-Mother is also protective and menacing at the same time. Black, because it is the color the artist associates with power, but also because the mother gives us biological life, and therefore death. This is a mother who, as Céline or Beckett would say, gives us life but not infinity. The infinity of language, of course, and of the sidereal spaces that Szajner never ceases to investigate.
A response to this work on the same level: Life, as such (une vie, en soi). « Two blades of light, drawn into a circular saraband, creating luminous, transparent and immaterial patterns... » wrote the artist of this work which he sees as a metaphor for life. Nonetheless, Szajner hints at the possibility of another interpretation.
Attracted by its dark part, the viewer may be fascinated by the opaque section of the work « an obscure territory where no one is obliged to follow the marked path and can create their own light. » To choose beyond "a life, as such", "one's very own life" which responds to the imposing hieratism of Mother with the vertigo of movement. In this way, at the beginning of this journey, two antithetical meanings take shape: To the power of others of which the mother is emblematic, answers the Power of Self, long-lived, persistent and possible... in other words, liberty.
An unparalleled explorer of new media who nonetheless remains faithful to the poetry tied to the materiality of the work, on the first floor, Szajner invites the spectator-voyager to a meeting with the wheels of intelligence of the man in progress. If life was is the incredibly evocative title of a video work representing, according to the artist, the complexity that puts us on the road to questioning. The work is "a forward tracking shot, very slow, into the interior of an immense mechanical assembly which turns, without grinding; an ‘apparently' perfect mechanism..." he writes. Our regard is swallowed by these bluish, metallic gears that desire to attract the spectator's attention to questions like "the perfection of the universe and of our own judgment by the wheels which, on second glance, seem to rebel against any mechanical mind." A succession of lures.
This floor is consecrated to grey, a color which Szajner associates with all that is airy, spiritual, linked to a quest, to a tense attraction towards something, to everything which for man is an internal experience as well as a rising above. In Canto XXVI of ‘Inferno', Danté calls it Transumanar, overcoming human limitations to achieve « virtute e conoscenza ».
Connecting text and image, text and sculpture, At Many No... is an electroluminescent installation in three parts. Three grey pyramids set on the ground seem to engender the curious stem of a flower, the summit of which blooms into a word. Respectively; At, a going towards; Many, a lot, all, the thirst for knowledge being never quenched; No, the third word in this sketch of a phrase which is also the piece and which ends in a curious No. A ‘no' which is one of choice, of free will, ever more affirmed.
The last floor is the black one. For Szajner this is the supreme level because it is by this that one reaches the light. Step by step, one ascends towards the blackness. Beckett's expression in ‘Company', "What visions in the dark of light!" could be the epigraph of the works presented in this space.
La naissance du monde (The Birth of the World), is composed of a small steel cone which emits a twinkling gleam. The spectator who looks deeply will notice an unbearable luminosity at the end. One cannot stare too long at the sun! This blinding follows the hubris of man who measures himself against the light itself.
On the same level, Ran is a luminous and sonorous installation inviting one to dive into what appears to be an artificial representation of nature. Giant vegetation is agitated by a wind that winds through it. Integrating sound like "a supplementary color", Szajner, both a plastic artist and a musical composer, uses sound as a totally separate plastic material, giving it weight and a harsh and profound consistency which develops the space of perception, making it resound, hesitate and evolve in the air. Using yet another language for this title, Ran, means chaos or a lack of order in Japanese. A lack of order that the artist nevertheless wishes to contain within the limits of a framework controlling what is shown and at the same time suggesting the invisible infinity of what is not. The second version of the piece, where light and the absence of color intervene in a different way, creating a tridimensional cosmology, has the most contradictory title imaginable: The Definite Infinity Enigma. The possibility of an infinity that could be "perceptible" to someone, an infinity that would be "defined", contained in a frame.
The pieces in this space are presented under the sign of passage, from the understood transformation to the sense of going beyond the visible. One perception can hide another, form undoes itself to make room for, not an abstract immateriality, but the pure migration of meaning, more ambiguous than ever, more multiple than ever, more than ever in the process of becoming.
Margherita Leoni
Paris, 27 April 2009
