Tomasz CIECIERSKI (b. 1945), From the series: Weeping landscapes, 2010

oil, collage canvas; 33 x 27 cm;
Signed, dated and described on the reverse, on cardboard: T.C. / 2010/ oil/collage and:
series: "WEEPING LANDSCAPES". [in pen].

Tomasz Ciecierski works in painting, drawing, photography and collage.
Since the late 1980s, the artist's work has featured the theme of
landscape, at that time still expressed simultaneously on a single sub-image.
Among other things, such works - capturing in one composition a kind of photographic,
time-lapse record - could be seen during the artist's exhibition
organized in 1990 at the Museum of Art in Lodz. It can be assumed,
that it was also then that the artist's idea of exploring
space in his paintings by means of the horizon line he mentions:
It turned out that the horizon line organizes the painting in an absolute way.
It builds depth. Just juxtapose two planes of blue color,
and you get the horizon line and the impression of three-dimensionality. The next step
related to the consideration of building space and at the same time
thought of transcending the peculiarities of the painting medium was the procedure applied by
Tomasz Ciecierski's rhythmic multiplication of successive canvases
bonded together permanently, at the same time hiding the earlier elements of the work, as the artist says.
elements of the work, about which the artist says: I like painting landscapes very much,
but only after juxtaposition, superimposition, multiplication do I make a statement
about the space more fully. Waldemar Baraniewski called this procedure picture-montage.
The montage, or more precisely the technique of collage, is also visible
in Tomasz Ciecierski's small landscape compositions, where the
the artist glues clippings of other paintings onto the original landscape.
These fragments are elements of his other canvases. Tomasz Ciecierski does not
limits himself to painting only. He photographs his small paintings against
against a white wall at different times of the day taking a painterly approach to the subject.
He lets the prints bear the trace of the sun in the form of the yellowish tones of the photo
or evening, when the light is sometimes darker or bluish. He photographs
also painters' utensils. He collects postcards, clippings, photos
from Polaroid to later juxtapose them with a painterly version of a landscape or build a
from them a pattern to create an authorial landscape.