With his plexiglass paintings, Andrzej Mamak seems to be striving toward some kind of new geometry; familiar lines and shapes, excavated from his subconscious, take on unsettling, altered forms: ancient rock formations, asteroids tumbling through space, topographic maps of apocryphal land masses, shards of fossilized bone... He has taken the rigid, antiseptic perfection of geometric forms – the neat squares and circles of abstract expressionism – and left them to weather for millennia, to be chiseled and honed by the seemingly random forces of unimaginable time. His lines hint at forgotten words and places, tongues too fleeting to be remembered, pieced together from the shards of detritus that emerge now and then to humble and remind us that history is cyclical rather than progressive. In that moment, we know what our protolanguage must have sounded like; we learn to speak all over again, in our own most timeless and intimate voices; we grasp what it is like to look down on the Earth from a great distance, drifting there in the solitary detachment of the atmosphere. But mostly, we are energized by the realization of an infinite world, by the drip of the amber beads that collectively weave the thick tangle of history. It is the viewer’s attempt to pinpoint this elusive juncture of time and space that gives Mamak’s work its drama. More recently, Mamak has begun to play with new styles and techniques, favoring the even starker minimalism of simpler lines, rotating his plexiglass “canvas” to experiment with compositional strategies, images spilling off into unbounded space, calling the viewer’s attention to the periphery, the boundaries of seen and unseen... He implores us to see behind, beyond, underneath, around what’s in front of us, to collaborate with him by picking up where he leaves off. In every image, he attempts to redefine that very infinity. Whatever he means, his implication remains constant: we need more than our eyes in order to see; we need nothing less than to ponder and embrace the lore and the myths of our own prehistory.
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With his plexiglass paintings, Andrzej Mamak seems to be striving toward some kind of new geometry; familiar lines and shapes, excavated from his subconscious, take on unsettling, altered forms: ancient rock formations, asteroids tumbling through space, topographic maps of apocryphal land masses, shards of fossilized bone... He has taken the rigid, antiseptic perfection of geometric forms – the neat squares and circles of abstract expressionism – and left them to weather for millennia, to be chiseled and honed by the seemingly random forces of unimaginable time. His lines hint at forgotten words and places, tongues too fleeting to be remembered, pieced together from the shards of detritus that emerge now and then to humble and remind us that history is cyclical rather than progressive. In that moment, we know what our protolanguage must have sounded like; we learn to speak all over again, in our own most timeless and intimate voices; we grasp what it is like to look down on the Earth from a great distance, drifting there in the solitary detachment of the atmosphere. But mostly, we are energized by the realization of an infinite world, by the drip of the amber beads that collectively weave the thick tangle of history. It is the viewer’s attempt to pinpoint this elusive juncture of time and space that gives Mamak’s work its drama. More recently, Mamak has begun to play with new styles and techniques, favoring the even starker minimalism of simpler lines, rotating his plexiglass “canvas” to experiment with compositional strategies, images spilling off into unbounded space, calling the viewer’s attention to the periphery, the boundaries of seen and unseen... He implores us to see behind, beyond, underneath, around what’s in front of us, to collaborate with him by picking up where he leaves off. In every image, he attempts to redefine that very infinity. Whatever he means, his implication remains constant: we need more than our eyes in order to see; we need nothing less than to ponder and embrace the lore and the myths of our own prehistory.