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Perhaps it’s hard to believe, but the discovery of the balancing sculpture motif, continuously pervading my works, has been quite a surprise to me. Already in the course of my studies, while I was occupied with considerations about composition, relations between forms in space, I didn’t realize that a number of sculptures balancing upon a single point were right there, as if they were inviting me to read the subconscious messages, hidden inside them.
Even after studies, while working in retreat of the Nurembergian Academy, analyzing the formal structures of dynamic structures inspired by human body, it did not seem unusual that, out of innumerable of opportunities, I chose the system in which the model stands as solid on their one foot as a stork.
At that point the establishment of “the matter of balance” for at least next few sculptures was set. Perhaps that time, when I was preparing new documentation or maybe with another several sculptures, I was come across with that belated reflection that something was wrong, mainly that the amount of balances was too striking to attribute it to merely fleeting fascination. In fact, that didn’t seem to suit me fine. After all, a sculptor secretly dreams of invoking a sensation of strength and stability, demonstrated through large masses, thus standing firmly as they represent strife between the concept and the matter. But instead, I still make those lean, half-long sculptures which surprise, even myself, with their ability to even stand on their own.
Even few years after, when I was daydreaming about slightly simpler and more chunky forms, I wasn’t surprised with the reappearance of the renewed version of “the matter of balance”, which happened unexpectedly in-between my considerations about completely different matters which together with “the matter of balance” comprise a set of three main strands of my research in the field of sculpture.
Sculpture and Balance
Sculpture is a special discipline for me. I had an opportunity to refer to it as “one of these interesting and valuable ways of actually reaching our humanity”. Sculpture might be, (perhaps it should be) an activity suspended in between the very concept and the continuously resistant matter. Personal grapples with that matter introduce to individual’s life humbleness and understanding, allowing them to get the insight into the world of form and the contents carried through, and consequently into the relations between the world of forms and the human as a cultural individual. I perceive sculpture as a connector with life, also valuable in relations with other people.
BALANCE expresses itself in many different ways in the presented sculptures. It manifests in the attempts of the very immediate balance of forms, as well as, with the use of rather static forms, in more complex intentions of retrieving the sensation of “catching the balance” – balancing which emerges somewhere in the addressee’s mental space. Employing sets, of which forms are highly contrasting with one another or even completely contrary media, and an attempt of integrating them into a homogenous structure, with a simultaneous desire to demonstrate a vast number of its similarities and differences, has become quite a challenge to me. A sustained excuse to draw on “the matter of balance”.
J.J., 2008
This is amended version of part of the text which has been originally featured in the exhibition catalogue The Matter of Balance in 2008.
