Krzysztof Tomalski — The Worlds of Krzysztof Tomalski
10th International Biennale of Graphics / Old City Hall / Split / Chorwacja
Krzysztof Tomalski / Grand Prix Splitgraphic 10th International Biennale of Graphics
curator / general organizer of the biennial: Marina Petit
Marina Petit. The Worlds of Krzysztof Tomalski.
During my work as curator of the Splitgraphic printmaking biennial I got acquainted with the printmaking oeuvre by Krzysztof Tomalski; his graphic prints Epidermises won the Special award at 7th Splitgraphic 2015 and later in 2016 he exhibited his almost full cycle Antigravity in Split.
Tomalski's exhibited printmaking cycles showed his inquiry into perennial themes, existential interests and dilemmas. In Antigravity he used not only new graphic techniques alintaglio, he invented, but achieved an artistic imagery showing notions of transcendence and transience in metaphysical and poetic way. The prints in the Antigravity cycle are interconnected by the artist's interest to explore our universe, physical elements of our world, cosmology and cosmogony. In them he created his own metaphorical narrative in order to reveal the immaterial through figuration, as well as through his own speculations. It is an incredibly distinguished oeuvre stemming from his own interests and reflections.
In his new graphic cycles he continues his study of the human spirit which now evolved into broader research of the universe and the universal. New prints tackle the universality of existence and creation, origins of mankind and sustains continuity with his previous work. At the same he is taking his creative and existential thought on a new abstract level.
New ideas and musings that occupy the artist are expressed by going back to classical intaglio techniques, dry point and mezzotint, while visually and artistically going forward by prolonging exploration. One could say that Tomalski the artist takes the role of a scientist, taking into consideration the characteristic development and approach to new intaglio techniques, modifying the cutter plotter, experimenting in printmaking media which goes hand in hand with the subjects he depicts and visual language that he uses. In his prints one may note parallelism and the duality of manual work, which is omnipresent and obviously important for printmaking, paired with ethereal themes.
In all of his recent cycles, the artist is searching for answers to questions concerning the phenomena of life and existence, and through his own reconsiderations he creates new graphic signs. This thread is uninterrupted in his new prints, in stunning graphic mastery of a medium and profound images made from 2017 to 2021.
In the cycle Genesis for Astrophysicists grid pattern covers entire fields rendering the prints onto the level of abstraction; these raster grids are rendering the prints onto the level of abstraction; these raster grids are rippled in the middle marking the centers and the sources together with disconnected human nudes in grey silvery tones. Complex embedded ideas marking the continuity and universality are especially evident in his sketches relating to the antiquity, when the artist uses templates of columns of different orders stemming from the books of architecture depicting proportions and rules. One of the rhetoric questions that imposes itself here is: Are there rules in our existence, being and in the world? Or are these just human marks? Is there more than this?
Cycles Big Bang.Genesis and The Drifting Gardens of delights sophistically deal with the ideas of creation. On the one hand they are very scientific and on the other extremely poetic and romantic evoking Nikola Tesla's ideas on light, energy and creation. For Tesla Light was the eternal energy and matter is borne from it, as in Tomalski's prints abstracting grids and underlying texts as graphic elements give birth to shapes, signs and winged human figures reminiscent of Icarus. Relating to one another Tesla's statements that humans had real and visible wings.
The subject of his new cycles is inextricably linked to his artistic vision in nie showing that creation is eternal, there is no beginning or end. Images Tomalski creates support the idea the artist said himself of a unity of man and nature. Nothing is really lost, the matter is just manifestation kie of the energy. As in the cycle Drift human dressed figures are floating, travelling through time like modern day Odysseus, reminding us of his dy previous works, and that we never disappear as Tesla said "I am part of a light and it is music".
The visual language of Tomalski's new cycles communicates harmony of a personal vision of the greatest mystery and destiny of every human. However, his graphics do not contain any pathos in their approach to the theme; Tomalski uses very refined, reflexive, intellectual motives, images, signs and techniques and gives them a personal, strong and philosophical interpretation crossing cultural references and boundaries.
Marina Petit
curator of the biennial
graphics: Krzysztof Tomalski, Genesis dla astrofizyków VI, sucha igła, mezzotinta, aluminium, 65 x 95 cm, 2018
Grand Prix Splitgraphic 10th International Biennale of Graphics