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Łukasz Siatkowski

between religiousness and sexuality

Welcome to the exhibition of works from the series entitled "between religiousness and sexuality".

My name is Łukasz Siatkowski. The pictures you may see here constitute my Piled-Up-Bible, a story about people from here.

Before I tell you the whole idea behind this exhibition, let me thank Maria for ensuring best practice in this place. Here, in the Art Brut gallery, different art forms are not exclusive, but rather harmonise with one another.

I’m glad the gallery happens to be at the very centre of culture, and not hidden somewhere within occupational therapy workshops.

I encourage you to use the term "a person with a disability" rather than "a disabled person". We should not classify art according to the author’s physical or mental health.

Would you say that the mind of Witkacy, Chagall or Dali is any different from the mind of an artist with Down syndrome in respect of the work itself? If the work proves its quality, we might as well skip the title of ‘the crippled guy’ and focus on the artist as an artist only.

After 20 years of work I can name all the demons I have to face as a person. First of all, I’m sick and tired of ghettos and social clubs created on the basis of disabilities. Just because someone doesn’t have an arm or is a wheelchair user doesn’t mean they should stay on the outside. No. Our place is among others.

The second problem I’d like to see gone is the anonymity. If there’s an assistant going arm in arm with a person, these are two people there that you can talk to, and not only the assistant.

Thirdly, it is my wish that individual home-schooling gives rise to intelligence. It is the only help we need for future integration. If it weren’t for my parents, so stubborn and consequent in their efforts to provide me with proper conditions for education and rehabilitation, I could not have become a student, an artist, or a husband.

It pains me to see the community expect the system to integrate us in the society top-down instead of supporting the kind of integration where both sides are engaged.

I know, I know, this might sound upsetting. You may ask, ‘But what if someone just can’t do more than they actually can?’ Ladies and gentlemen, I encourage you to put up a fight against those limitations and keep striving for new possibilities. Don’t just give in to this sentimental approach to your disabilities, since these emotions, in the end, rob the so-called weak of their dignity. This is because we allow others to convince us of our weakness and we don’t fight our demons on a daily basis. You can always create proper conditions if you keep on dreaming. Let me remind you that my youth coincided with the system change. It was the time when everything had to be done from scratch. Submitting the first request for the school to install a wheelchair ramp. Convincing my teachers that I’m really not a vegetable. And so on.

Don’t tell me that it is impossible or more difficult now than it was then. Pope John Paul II told us to demand of ourselves, even if others do not demand much from us. Such exemplary Catholics as we are, we have no choice but to demand from ourselves.

This biblical series of works is an example that I wish give you, an example of inner fight. They present characters which are so mentally distant, yet so universal in terms of their dreams and desires. Don’t we bring our own Isaacs to bind them on the altar as well? Don’t we spy on our own Bathsheba, just like David did, while her husband was away? Don’t we wage wars? Don’t we wish for God to accept us as we are?

We are and let us still be His chosen ones. Look, we are on a desert like they were. To some point we know where to go, to some point we don’t. But we should always have some hope and, even more important, the soul of a warrior.

By creating this series I wanted to bring these stories closer to you, stories which happened thousands of years ago. I wanted to tell you that we will manage, too.

But to avoid corny coaching clichés, I’d really like to invite you to join the discussion on how to get rid of those imaginary limits of ours, to exchange your experiences, best practises and risks, but most importantly, to contemplate art.

Karambolizacja przestrzeni

Łukasz Siatkowski’s pile-up/ a collage (vertical) dated 2010, untitled, 210x290cm, in black. Done on paper, it was painstakingly drawn with a pen and populated with tiny symbols scattered on small, irregular fields. From the bottom of the collage, some of the fields are entirely filled with black. The ones at the bottom are smaller and seem to ascend towards those at the top. All elements are drawn in the same pattern, lighter at the bottom and darker at the top. The symbols include: dots, little circles, dark triangles, triangles with dots, squares filled with spirals or parallel lines. The entire sheet is a flurry of tiny details, one can only imagine the effort of filling and piling up the entire space. The image was prepared over an entire month of summer holidays. The artist recalls this as a time of loneliness, and that sadness radiates from the finished work. It is the immensity of a world devoid of hardly any brightness, and where brightness does flicker it is only to swiftly return to black. Rather than attempt to further describe the work – or ‘pile-up of space’ by Łukasz Siatkowski, let me quote the author’s own poem that will do so much more accurately:

Shreds of carelessly scattered clothes arrange themselves in a never-ending communion of colour around the loving eye, evoking not only the impression but also the taste of the otherworldly dance of lovers in which no side even dreams of submission. But there is no paint or hurt in it, only sounds of the great symphony of all-powerful love. Descending to the surface of unperturbed water, space dust vibrates the serene structure to the brink of unconsciousness, creating a never before heard opus of newly emerging elements as it constitutes new universes and brings in the silence of those last moments before the final stellar explosion.

Human Crowd

A horizontal collage dated August 2013, 210x297 cm. Each of the artist’s very specific works is difficult to describe, but this one even more so than others. Unlike the other collages done in black, this work takes full advantage of colour: red, violet, blue, green, celadon, and pink, with prominent tiny elements in black. Each colour is a separate field, 6 by 8 cm (more or less), beyond that no rules seem to apply. Each of the fields is filled with unique elements: dots, checkers, lines, strange symbols, spirals, or other flourishes. In the top right corner, a violet field is filled with capitalized letters spelling a message which roughly translates to “a crowd of strangers makes the city’s ZOOM!!!”. Łukasz Siatkowski arranges, seemingly at random, a network of tiny markings by applying the pen to the surface of the pad and shaping a compelling space out of his lines/dots, a reduction – or as he would call it a pile-up of the sheet of paper whose white sometimes peer out from behind the colour.