Jan Malaszek

MAPS Unit 1 Week 3 27/10/05

Photography and Art: Jan Malaszek

Jan Malaszek showed work from the last five years, when photography became a significant part of his work.

Etching work prior to this was to do with materials and processes, the move to photographic work represented a break from this.

1^st piece. Joseph Niepce’s photograph of a farmhouse was the starting point for this work. Malaszek sees historical photographs as ‘proof of how things were’ so this image is the first photographic proof – a “coming into being in the consciousness”.

The image was photocopied onto acetate and then embedded in wax. The image was mounted onto mdf.

2^nd piece. The same Niepce image was projected onto board and a painting was made from the projected image. Bits of acetate containing drawn marks were embedded, with the photograph, into was on top of the painting. A strip of copper down the right hand side of the image “gives the picture a sense of being – it’s an object not just a picture”; the object contains the picture.

Several other, similar slides were shown. The source photographs varied in subject and no obvious reason for selection was apparent. The technique seemed to be somewhat repetitive and the choice of photographs (other than the Niepce one) seemed to be random and unconnected to the final output, which was broadly the same every time. Is he really using the images to inform his picture making or is he just applying the same techniques to images regardless of the subject matter? Why should an image of Niepce’s barn receive the same treatment as a photograph of the universe cut from a newspaper?

I found it difficult to engage with this work. The first piece fascinated me, not least because the artist had used one of the first ever photographic images as his starting point and I could see the significance of giving it ‘new life’ by his wax and acetate process. But after that, I lost interest…

The artist seemed not to remember significant things about his work: processes, source of photographs, materials used and so on, leaving the impression that he was no longer attached to this work.

Malasezek moved away from this wax/acetate method and went back to painting from photographs. At the same time, he stopped using photographs from journals and started acquiring images from junk shops: postcards, old photos and so on.

Jan Malaszek is Polish. He grew up in England, but felt nevertheless the sense of loss so familiar to Polish citizens and ex-patriates. He first went to Poland when he was thirteen “with a head full of images and stories about what Poland is like”. When asked if Poland’s history had affected his work and specifically his selection of lost and found images (photographs found in junk shops, having been separated from their original owners) Malaszekk said that there was no conscious awareness of a connection but “there must be something there”.

The next development in Malaszek’s work centred around the idea of Fragments. He spoke of an article by the composer John Woolrich, who in turn referred to a story by Elizabeth Bishop about a man who collected and sorted fragments of paper found on the beach. The man sorted the scraps into three piles: text which was about him, text which helped him to understand others, and finally text which he didn’t understand. Having sorted the bits of paper, he burned them in his brazier. This notion of collecting fragments appealed to Malaszek and he used it to inform his work from that point on.

The next few examples shown were of paintings which had as their starting point a found image – a small boy from Poland, a lady on a veranda, a woman with a child… The content was abstracted and used as the basis for a painting. Some of the images had enormous poignancy, if only in that they were somebody’s personal snapshots and as such deeply significant to someone, somewhere, a long time ago. Here they were given new life and relevance.