Foreword

The Taller Boricua Gallery is proud to host an international exchange exhibition with leading artists from Poland whose work is pushing the envelope of contemporary printmaking, new media and installations. Transmigration - Krakow and New York brings the work of two artists Tadesusz Myslowski (Polish artist living in NYC) and Jani Konstantinovki Puntos (resident of Krakow) to El Barrio. An earlier version of the exhibition including the artists Wojciech Krzywoblocki was first organized by the National Krakow Museum under the title “Reduction of Space” and was part of the events associated with the International Print Triennial of Krakow.

Printmaking is a passion shared by many Puerto Rican artists and is one of the cornerstones of the Taller Boricua mission. Historically, the Print Triennial of Krakow has attracted the interests of master Puerto Rican printmakers like Lorenzo Homar, who participated in earlier exhibitions. Last year, I had the pleasure of joining several Puerto Rican and Latin American artists who were invited to exhibit our work at Dominik Rostworowski Gallery as part of the program of the International Print Triennial or Krakow. These international cultural exchanges, often initiated by artists and curators who want to expand the intercourse of art beyond the major galleries and institutions, help to expose totally new audiences to the ideas and visual thinking of artists from other lands.

I want to thank Diógenes Ballester, the guest curator, for fostering the ties that have allowed the sharing of these aritists’ works with the residents of East Harlem and New York. Both of these artists bring a unique vision and solution to the traditional notion of a print and it is my hope that our audience will share our excitement at hosting these fine artists.

Fernando Salicrup, Executive Director
Taller Boricua

Detial of Invitation

Curatorial Statement: Transmigration, Appropriation and Collaboration in New Media Projects from Polish Born Artists

By Diógenes Ballester

Edited by mboncher

As the guest curator for this exhibition entitled Transmigration – Krakow and New York, I am honored to introduce to a New York audience the prints and installations of two major Polish Tadeusz Myslowski and Jani Konstantinovski Puntos. I will briefly address the concept of transmigration, the common aspects of appropriation and transformation of reality in the work exhibited, and end with a tale of international exchange.

For the purpose of this exhibition, transmigration speaks both of artists who have immigrated to another place and of their works which have moved from one state of existence to another. First, there is the physical immigration of the artists themselves. Both artists in this exhibition were born in Poland. Myslowski, born in Piotrkow, Poland in 1943, moved to New York in 1970. Konstantinovski Puntos, born in Walbrzych, Poland in 1961 of parents who had themselves immigrated from Macedonia and Greece, recently transplanted himself in New York as a visiting artist at the State University of New York, New Paltz. As with many immigrating artists throughout the world, the works of Myslowski and Konstantinovski Puntos manifest artistic visions and expressions that transcend a particular culture and address an increasingly global perspective. In particular, Myslowski’s transformation of photographic images into geometric abstractions and Konstantinovcki Puntos’ minimalist combinations of anthropological archetypes, mathematical formulas, and scientific symbols speak of a world embedded in a not so clear or pure empiricist epistemology.

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The second aspect of transmigration is in the works of the artist. Each of the two artists is an established printmaker who has won numerous prizes for creative and experimental conceptual work at international print biennials throughout the world. Myslowski’s geometric abstract photographs and prints come from his artistic conception of transforming photographs to the point that the original image is no longer recognizable. To create these geometric abstract photographs, he divides the original images into parts and enlarges the parts to the maximum. Konstantinovski Puntos combines ideas from anthropology, mathematics, and physics to create his minimalist photographic like prints that denote the complex yet simple universe in which humans live and must survive. His new media installations consist of digitalized images of his mixed media prints presented either on a monitor screen or projected on a larger wall, along with recorded sounds.

One can certainly see common roots in these artists’ works. Myslowski in the 1960’s and Konstantinovski Puntos in the 1980’s, studied at the Krakow Academy of Fine Arts. They were influenced by the Polish avant-garde movement of 1928, which included Aleksander Krzywoblocki who created photomontage documenting simultaneous images of reality. So it is not surprising that the exhibiting artists appropriate images and transform the images or the meaning of the images.
Myslowski and Konstantinovski Puntos together with Wojciech Krzywoblocki further developed their transmigrating in a collaborative installation titled “Reduction of Space” presented at the National Museum of Krakow as one of the invited shows of the International Print Triennial of Krakow in 2003. This collective work was defined as a conceptual art intervention with the museum itself. Symbolically confronting the establishment of the National Museum of Poland, they constructed an intersecting diagonal wall from one side of the ancient building to the other upon which they presented digital projections of their prints, overlapped with video images of torture committed in wars throughout the world.

That we will get a small sampling of these artists’ work here in El Barrio, Spanish Harlem New York City, is a great privilege. One of Myslowski’s his first explorations of his process in the 1970’s was a series of geometric abstract prints on the theme of the Avenue of the Americas. In the current exhibition he offers another presentation of New York City in an installation of books and film focused on post 9/11 experience. Konstantinovski Puntos presents a new media installation including prints and found objects on the theme Mediaeval Malbork Castle, one of the largest monuments of gothic architecture in the world.

This brings us to a tale of international exchange which itself is about transmigration. Jani Konstantinovski Puntos and I met in Taipei, Taiwan for the award ceremony of the International Print Biennial of Taipei in 2001. Sharing ideas and transnational experiences has been central to our numerous, often late-night, interchanges over the past three years. In 2003, the realization of some of our shared ideas was presented in Krakow, Poland in our first collaborative curatorial project entitled “Intersecting Circles: Metaphors of Caribbean and Latin American Tran nationalism”. Presented at the Dominik Rostworowski Gallery as part of the program of the International Print Triennial of Krakow, “Intersecting Circles” examined the question of the commonality and differences in the artistic messages of six immigrants Latin American and Caribbean artists. As you can see from this brief essay, there is a similar, though varied, theme underlying the current exhibition.

“Transmigration”, our second collaborative project, has been brought to fruition in conjunction with Fernando Salicrup, a New York based artist and Executive Director of El Taller Boricua, The Puerto Rican Workshop, Inc. Salicrup, a digital artist who won the experimental prize at the XII San Juan Biennial of Latin American and Caribbean Printmaking in 1998 was one of the artists in the Intersecting Circles Exhibition. While in Krakow, Salicrup not only joined in the dialogue about transnationalism, transmigration and appropriation but also provided Konstantinovski Puntos technical and artistic assistance for his exhibition titled “ The Alchemicus” at the Slovak Gallery of Art. In “The Alchemicus” Konstantinovski Puntos presented an animated version of his graphics on a portable computer screen placed on metal ink cans and wood boards from an old printing shop with sounds from the shop as background.

In the context of an international exchange between Polish artists and El Barrio, New York City “Transmigration” at The Taller Boricua Gallery continues the quest and search for art in transit that deals with the impact of new ideas and the uses of new technologies. The questions asked, the tentative answers posed offer perspectives particularly to the realm of printmaking, where established biennials and triennials such as those of Krakow and San Juan Puerto Rico are searching for their place in the art world of today. We look forward to future collaborative exhibitions potentially at the Avant Caribe Museum and the triennials of our native lands.

El Barrio, New York City, 2004

Transmigration: Krakow and New York

By Dorota Folga Januszewska, Vice Director

National Museum of Warsaw

Translated by Piotr Krasnowolski


Exhausted with excess, weary of watching, and tired of cognizing, this time we are faced with a chance of a different encounter.

Expansion, the tiresome broadening, escape to nowhere, chasing the line of the horizon that speeds up never disappearing… - these states of fatigue have become common. On top of these, add parallel universes we hear about more and more often - how very possible and empirically cognizable: as real as time in the crowd of haste - they do exist, though our intuition won't willingly help us understand them. Metaphysics at the vanity fair of physics. The excess of potential (though rarely put to practice), ambiguity, jumble of cultures and images, of totems and temples. Potential art and art commonly unnecessary. Like the kaleidoscope of dreams (beautiful and debasing), art is as active as its foster daughter - advertisement. Relativism.

The natural, biological instinct of intellect discovers the pleasure of limiting in this sea of potential. Reduction? Tight as a string before making the sound, the thought vibrates in wait, aware of its might - and let it vibrate so for we cannot hear it presently. The breath of form will be held long, we can at most be astonished by the beauty of this standstill, self-control. The aesthetics of silence that Cage found the 'framework' of hearing and the structure of the 'medium' is also the matter for two Masters: Tadeusz Myslowski, Jani Konstantinovski Puntos. They exist independently in parallel worlds, related by the love of polishing the inner space. Their air: that little cell of great energy, hidden in the thought, may suddenly stir up the pile of associations: there is no need to build walls and entrenchments from canvas and paper; there is no need to strive against the vicious reality of objects; there is no need to set the date in the internal camera. Like the Shaolin monks, they can crack rocks at a touch of a finger or stand on the head and maintain the pose forever.

Each of these artists may reject his favorite media, may shake off the cloaks of the drawings and paintings, and even then - thanks to the shape of the thoughts - remain identifiable. The space of each of the artists follows the shape of his way. The Spiral, The Mobius band, the fluctuating infinity, the absolute cube, a point.

Reduction of the space is for them but a change of the form. The thought remains free and ready to fill any vessel. The shape of the things is a attribute of the moment: rising and fading, the energy of the space develops forms.

In Their monastery of the space thinking is the precept. They are an Order that follows a strict but merciful rule. No accidental images. Reformed interior.

The installation, as any other medium - as the brush and the canvas, as the marble and the silk - makes it possible to open and close any window of imagination. Yet this time, we do not deal with individual mythologies. These are no puns, no plays of meanings, nonsense’s, and parables. The art of those four artists has the nature of Genesis. The creation and not mere creating. Installation of the absence of matter. We learn about the world thanks to its disappearance. The limits of the absent form. In the process itself, such an artistic stance has much in common with the printmaker's skill and experience. An absence copied. Whiteness as a trace. Discovered traces and eternal rights. The suspended bridge connecting the extremely different personalities of Puntos and Myslowski. Between them the printmaking process taken too lightly in its ambiguity. Idea, block, void, print: and finally the image that spans various stages of creation. Printmaker's installation. The absent block, the non-material process, a print in the space. Visual recording of the sound. Visual recording of the word.

Also philosophy exists thanks to the gathering of small black specks on a white sheet. For no one wants to dress the recorded ideas into material images. The 'new media' (being 'new' for no more than a fraction of a moment) are only a consolation in the fatigue of the art: they may facilitate much in the recording of the process of disappearance. Thanks to them, reduction of the space is noticed and noticeable. Supporting the installation, these media make it possible to simulate the spatial interval. In the days when the continuous and pathologically quick updating of everything leads to the murder committed on the document of time, the art of these four is like the Hammurabi's Code. It is the recording of our space reduced to the form of a sign. It is an alphabet, a code, a message, and an idea. It is as real as experimental physics that proves even the least imaginable laws of nature. Nature? Here, we have reached the spiritual community that these artists share. Their sensitivity makes it possible to discover the abstract, pure, and nearly unchangeable mechanics of Nature.

Warsaw, Poland, 2004

THOUGHTS ABOUT TRANSMIGRATION
written by Szymon Bojko
The first thing that comes to one’s mind is the Apollinaire’s work “Zone”: ….You’re weary of this ancient world at last
… Here you are at Marseilles among the melons
…Here you are at Coblenz the Hotel du Geant
….At Rome beneath a Japanese medlar tree
…. In Amsterdam with a girl you think is pretty
.. You are in Paris you have been arrested
...You walk toward Auteuil you want to go on foot (original translation)

On the first reading of those verses I could perceive in myself a kind of motion. My “I” rambled with me evolving in cubism. I double and triple myself. I am here as well as there and there and elsewhere …

Division. Disengagement. Transmigration. Migration of cultures. Exoduses, returns, adaptability. The poet-futurist Mlodozeniec will ask: here-am am I am-there?

The poet-vagabond Cendrars dashing through the Russian wilderness in a trans-siberian train is counting the miles separating him from Paris. Mickiewicz, poetic conscience of Polish people, is arranging liberating pacts in Crimea. Had not Warhol´s parents left the poor Slovakia in time, the world would have never known him. In Hong-Kong, I met a happy graphic artist from Austria, Henry Steiner, touched by the Chinese culture he remains a gourmet of Viena cuisine.

Rilke had not experimented the true exaltation in any other place until he found it on the river bank of Volga. A short time before the I World War, Ascona, a little village at the foot of the Swiss Alps, called Monte Verita, suddenly became a Mecca for intellectuals and artists from Germany, Austro-Hungary, Russia, France. Jung, Mary Wigman, Kropotkin, Bakunin created, wrote, danced and philosophized there. Idealists, mrxists and anarchists. In the nearby Zürich, the immigrants from Rumania, Tzara and Janco together with the German Huelsenbeck and Balla put up their tents of the Dadaistic Revolution. Max Ernst forsook his homeland on the River Rhine and settled in Paris.

The city on Seine grew to be visited by the restless American souls of Man Ray, Gertrude Stein, Hemingway; Foujita dandy, a painter of beautiful women arrived from Japan; artists from Poland, Ukraine and Russia came over. Misia Godebska-Sert, Polish, symbolists’ muse, was conquering French and English hearts. From Iberia, genius Picasso set out to overcome France and the rest of the world. With his Spanish temperament and genes he became the pride of the French. Duchamp’s French esprit turned out to be an ignition of a scandal in New York when he dared send a water closet basin for an exhibition considering it an object of art. Soon, the “Armory Show”, that is a jump of the European modernists over the Atlantic was to be digested by the New Yorkers.

Malevich in fact, only once was granted a safe-conduct by the red sovereigns of Russia to go abroad but thanks to that event the painter’s works, loaded as his luggage, found their way to the biggest museums and completed the picture of the 20th century art. Migration of art works together with their authors or without them, speeded up the revolutionary changes in music. Radical Schoenberg’s discoveries of the dodecafonic technique in Vienna preceded Cage’s aleatory method.

Likewise, Strawinski’s innovative musical ideas, Mondrian’s neo-plastic rhythms, Kiesler’s space-scenography constructions, Albers’s refined, flat and precise geometries and spaces and objects created by Mies van den Rohe went round our globe.

I close that journey of trans-immigration with a quotation from Witold Gombrowicz’ s
Trans-Atlantyk, the semi-autobiographical satirical book on the émigré fate of a writer caught in Argentina: The twenty-first of August 1939 I was making to land in Buenos Aires on the ship “Chrobry”. Exquisitely pleasurable the sail from Gdynia to Buenos Aires,and somewhat loathe was I to go ashore, for twenty days a man between Sky and water, nothing remembered, bathed in air, melted in wave, through-blown with wind. (original paragraph)

The list of shiftings and migrations of creative people can be multiplied without end.

On this long list there are names-symbols, Einstein, Moholy-Nagy, Diagilev, Rubinstein, Lifar, Malinowski. Included here are emigrations of political and conceptual motivation, caused by wars, emigrations forced, imposed, banishments, etc. Those migrations realized out of personal preference, originated by the curiosity of the world, challenge, cognitive instinct, are one of the bridges built on the planet Earth; their pioneers were itinerant men. The Waregians are the men who put forward to us, contemporary people, the idea of interesting life.

The exhibition in Spanish Harlem is a contribution to the testimony of those relocations and an example of a life here-am and there-am, as the Polish futurist mentioned above once wrote. I add to this list a Polish-American painter Tadeusz Myslowski who has lived in the USA for 32 years, a multimedia graphic artist Jani Konstantinovski Puntos, Polish citizen form Macedonia, and Jac Avila Vermeer, descendant of the Great Dutch, whose family emigrated to Bolivia, co-author of the film Cross-Over, presented during this exhibition.

Translated by Zofia Kamila Krzeminska

(except for the excerpts indicated)

Remarks by Witold Skulicz
President of International Print Triennial of Cracow,
Cracow, Poland

When it comes to writing about artists, especially the one whose art is intertwined with threads of his experience and heritage that have been passed or taken from various sources, it needs to be written in simple words. I do not want to sound poetically so as not to parallel artist’s visions.

I do not believe that an excellent artist needs to be described in an incomprehensible way.

JanisKonstantinovski Puntos, a Macedonian/Greek who lives in Cracow, keeps surprising me by the fact that six years ago of his studies at Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow, with rather rigid program, did not change or disturb his genetic memory of the past. He has developed his art skills and position in Cracow.

His love to print is emanating from his art works, it is emanating with vitality and concentration.

I have been thinking what makes a great artist, what makes him better and better every time. What opens the way to a brilliant career so as he can climb steps up to the gates of the world.

Probably it is self-communication, inner emigration and ability to sacrifice him for art.

These are also powers that are able to break barriers of indifference. These are advantages of Konstantinovski’s soul, the ones he possesses, and the ones, which are able to let him to sacrifice himself on the altar of art. Give him ability to fly… what we can always witness.

I think, that the gates of the arts paradise, the world artists are dreaming about, are opening in front of Jani Konstantinovski Puntos.

Appreciation and numerous awards also witness this, he receives. This is what I whish him in his artistic way.