MIKOŁAJ CHYLAK

Whether it was my problem with communication or a problem with language as such, I do not know. There was certainly some trouble from which the painting began. A child who does not speak thinks and wants to say something, to point at something. At THIS, at THIS and at THIS. At that time tanks with Polish soldiers were driving down the streets, in space the Rebels were attacking the Death Star, and at nursery we were given some disgusting substance meant to protect us from a mysterious cloud carried by the wind blowing from the east. And fish swam in bathtubs, as a certain singer sang. I remember my father trying to kill them in the bathroom with a dumbbell. Each of these stories can be told separately, but I have always had the feeling that something connects them. It was the connection between them that seemed most interesting to me. It pointed to what had been and to what was yet to come. Both then and today I try to tame what may happen. To tame it through marks put down on paper, canvas or in clay. Childhood is sometimes said to be a magical time, meaning some vague fairy-tale situation. Yet we rarely look at a child as a shaman performing acts meant to tame the world. The child is not stupid; it knows that the fate of wars, space flights or nuclear power plant failures does not depend on it. It knows that safety can be an illusion. At least the child brought up on films in which little actors run around the rubble of a city (so what if it has already been rebuilt?). The joy that after dinner it will draw the route of the "Peace Race" with friends for a game of bottle caps changes little here. The child suspects that something connects the two stories. Something it cannot say.

I think of art as a possibility and a ritual more than as objects, works. Objects weigh us down; they are hard to take on a journey, should the need arise. I portrayed the painter as a vagrant, a porter, yet what he carries is not paintings. I imagine that he carries brushes, paints, magical objects that allow worlds to be joined together.

Mikołaj Chylak – a visual artist. He runs the Painting and Drawing Studio at the Faculty of Design of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. In 2018 he held a scholarship from the Minister of Culture and National Heritage. In 2019 he defended his doctoral thesis "Atlas jako zbiór i podróż" [The Atlas as Collection and Journey] at the Faculty of Painting of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. He specialises in painting, as well as drawing and screen printing; he creates visuals for contemporary music concerts and small sculptural forms. In 2012–2014 he co-organised "Wolne loty" [Free Flights], a series of events enabling collaboration between visual artists and musicians. He has shown his works and visuals at, among others, Biuro Wystaw, Galeria Kordegarda, Galeria Promocyjna, the Polish Institute (in Berlin and Leipzig), the Podlasie Philharmonic, the Szczecin Philharmonic, Teatr Nowy, the Jewish Historical Institute, the POLIN Museum, the Warsaw Rising Museum, the Zofia and Wacław Nałkowski Museum and the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute . He co-creates the "Pracownia Wschodnia" gallery in Warsaw's Praga district.

He practises figurative painting which, from the author's perspective, examines the European idea of civilisation, its inconsistencies and poetry, as well as the violence inherent in it. The artist draws inspiration from press photographs, art history and film stills. On their basis he builds the complex iconography of his works.

JĘDREK OWSIŃSKI

Leaves can grow regardless of whether we worry. A bit like drawings.

The adults discussed, we drew. Children draw, adults discuss. Martial law, Popiełuszko, there'll be a nuclear war, the apparitions at Fatima, Chernobyl. Rusks behind the armchair waited for the war.

In my drawings there were trees and birds, in Mikołaj's aliens and people in masks. A child draws, a child does not speak. What is in dreams and drawings need not be logical – not all parts of the brain speak the same language. You live, you draw, you tame. The child thinks the adult understands. Now I think the adult does not understand either. He can try to take care of the child.

Once, recently, I carried a teenager through a forest. A big, chilled child with a beard. I was an adult. He had been through more than me. I tried not to go through anything. A bit like the story of Saint Christopher – this child carries the world.

In childhood I dreamed other people's dreams about war, about the end of the world – passed on to me by adults, they took up residence in my head. In my drawings there were trees and birds. For years I fixed my gaze on trees and birds. I lived in times of peace. Later I dreamed of an endless journey with changes of train. It could have been an opening world from which dread was disappearing, but also an awareness of impermanence in which it is not worth getting attached. Chernobyl may not be a power plant, but in Ukrainian wormwood, roadside mugwort. And yet it is the name of the apocalyptic star that falls from the sky.

I feel that we live on a shore, and what lies beyond is mysterious. Beyond it, meanings reverse. Mystery can be life-giving, mystery can be deadly. One can try to hold on to the concrete and the literal. One can try to tame the mystery within oneself, travelling through this strange space in the manner of the Stalker.

This child in me can draw. A drawing grows like a tree, comes like a daydream, tames the world. It is like breathing – a focus on the gesture itself, on leaving a trace, on the nature that is in me, which speaks for itself through untamed creation. To take care of the child is to allow this. Taking care of the child is an attempt to take care of the world.

Jędrek Owsiński – works in visual art and environmental biology. He practises painting and drawing. He most often makes graphic works in connection with his involvement in grassroots social and ecological movements. He also creates visuals linked to music. As a biologist he specialised in behavioural ecology. He works at a school and organises trips to the forest aimed at a many-sided experience of our relationships with the environment. In education he looks for links with the happening. In his painting he takes up the subject of the relationship between creativity and nature, and the nature of human creativity. He draws inspiration, among other things, from folk traditions. He co-creates the gallery at "Pracownia Wschodnia". He has shown his works and visuals at, among others, Galeria Promocyjna, the Podlasie Philharmonic, Teatr Nowy, the POLIN Museum, the Dom Chemika in Puławy, and many places that are not well-known art institutions.