A WOODEN HUT. Five broad horizontal planks of wood make up one wall, against which lean two narrower planks. The rough surface of the wood catches the light from the open door, through which one can glimpse a patch of blue sky and other buildings, one of which is topped by a narrow chimney or spire. The light clings to the edges of the boards and nestles in the roughness of the planks. On the right side of the room, which is otherwise empty, stands a mysterious construction, a sort of Noah’s Ark on wheels, glowing in the semi-darkness.
There is nothing cold about this room. It is not something we look at so much as something we inhabit. We experience the light and the wooden boards as that which surrounds us, not something merely open to our gaze. Here is a place of refuge.
Because this place of refuge is made of wood it does not feel permanent; yet because it is made of wood it feels protective, human, natural. Each plank has been planed and cut and joined by human hands out of what had once been living trees. The mysterious contraption on wheels, on the other hand, is totally self-contained and faintly threatening, a hooded mover. It has come from another place and will perhaps soon be moving on. Yet the door is wide open, nothing is holding us in here, in this silent empty hut, whose only inhabitants, other than ourselves, seem to be the light and the shadows, the wheeled ark and the dust on the rough wooden surfaces. And though the silence and emptiness are slightly eerie, they also seem conducive to meditation and the work of memory. No blood will spatter these walls, no screams punctuate this silence. Here we can gather our memories, dream, and wait.
No doubt the hut will one day be dismantled, the whole wooden village too perhaps, and in its place there will, once again, be nothing but fields and trees and mud.
But if the hut is to be dismantled, if the inhabitants will inevitably move on, then this painting, made with as much care, and with its loving workmanship as fully exposed as the hut, will remain. It will encapsulate memory at the same time as it is witness to an activity. Without the memory there would be no activity, but without the activity memory itself would have disappeared.
This painting then, is no icon. It is not an object of religious or aesthetic contemplation. Rather, like Chardin’s great images of silent concentration, it draws us into the process of living and making as something both wondrous and ordinary, into a space of both refuge and renewal, where we may acquire the strength and confidence to leave when the time comes, as it surely will.
There is that mysterious wheeled ark in its corner on the right again, but here it only seems to be a big toy, for we half look down upon it. It is difficult to see how it got here, and how it will ever get out, for the last rungs of a ladder, appearing at the bottom of the picture, tell us we are on some sort of platform. Clouds whirl down into this space, which seems to be enclosed on all four sides yet open to the heavens above. Mysterious shadows play on the wooden walls, and, against the wall, next to a tree-stump of a stool, a small black cat sits staring unblinkingly past us.
Nothing is happening here. The objects appear to have been left standing in this place for a long time. Perhaps once someone climbed the ladder and dumped the wheeled ark in a corner, sat perhaps for a while on the tree-stump and then climbed back down again. Only the cat sits, unmoving, staring into the darkness, and the sun and moon cast their shadows in turn upon the walls.
Copernicus perhaps once came here to study the stars and work out that the earth is not the centre of the universe but only a peripheral planet moving round the sun. But this deserted platform does not convey anything like Pascal’s fear of infinite spaces. There is too much sense of the natural and the man-made for that, and the presence of the cat and the little wheeled ark are strangely reassuring. The earth may no longer be the centre of the universe and man no longer thought of as made in God’s image, but for whoever comes here this is a kind of centre, a place to gather oneself together and come to some sort of accommodation with the indifferent elements. The whirl of cloud or the tumbling falls of snow of Tower of Copernicus – Winter, the beautifully shaped shadows nestling in the wooden beams of the construction, even the eerie light which catches the walls and floorboards in Tower of Copernicus – Autumn – these are not threatening but show rather the wondrous nature of the world in which we move and have our being. It is a beauty which does not ask to be admired, like the beauty of a sunset or a seascape, but which surrounds us and reveals itself to us as we go about our human work of making ladders, calculating the movement of the stars, or painting pictures. It is a beauty which is never still and will never be caught, but this is a part of what we are as we are part of the world of shadows and clouds and stars, of tumbling fluffy snow and whirling summery light, a beauty which is always textured, dense, yet evanescent, the beauty too of layered pigment and raw canvas, testifying to the work of the hand and the brush, themselves a part of our common world.
A table is the sign and symbol of the human. Animals need no tables, and we need them for the two quintessential human activities of communal eating and solitary working. An altar too is a kind of table, on which that other quintessential human activity takes place: the sacrifice to the God, whether of the household or the universe. In Judaism and (in different fashion) in Christianity, sacrifice has been replaced by ritualised communal eating.
In Andrzej Jackowski’s recent table paintings there appears at first to be no community. There is a solitary figure standing beside or in front of a table, or, in one instance, seeming to be part of the horizontal surface of the table itself. But these are not images of solitude. The walls here are painted with a vibrancy and warmth which, even when only a naked bulb hangs from the ceilings, endows the space with that nesting, comforting quality already evident in the hut of Refuge/Refugee. And on the table are boxes, sieves, cut flowers in vases, whole cities even, suggesting that the table is less a simple surface than a laboratory for human making and remaking.
The strangest of these paintings is The Burying, but it is also the key to them all. This is another human ritual: the burying of something precious. Surprisingly in this painter, who has brought back to painting the notion of the dappled, what the Greeks called poikilos and admired above all other effects, what Hopkins adored and saw as the sign of life itself, and which had been lost to the visual arts since the death of Bonnard, the background to this painting is bright and harsh, almost painful to look at. And then the river of light snaking across the bottom – is that where the burying is to take place? Or has it already taken place and has the object to be buried been safely sealed inside the box on the table? It is an elegant box, carefully constructed. Beside it is a circular white metal sieve or colander, the only round shape in the picture apart from the girl’s head, echoing the wavy line of the river of light below. It is made to contain (like the box), but also to let out, to sift and allow to be dispersed, an emblem of the whole painting and the entire series. The girl, standing on the edge of the chair in her bare feet, has not climbed up out of fear or the desire to escape, but seems rather to be lifted up by the glowing presence of the colander. Yet she, like everything else in the picture, is not flying but is firmly rooted by the force of gravity.
The title tells us not about her or her feelings, but about an activity, perhaps a ritual. It takes no sides, refuses to tell us if this is a repression or an expiation. That gives it the authority of ancient story-telling, an authority which it carries effortlessly and which inheres in every part of the canvas, which is, like all these table paintings, completely open to our gaze and yet mysteriously withdrawn from it, returned to itself. It thus, like the Chardins again, makes no claim on the viewer but allows him to enter or leave at will, to wander over the surface or pause over a detail. Something is taking place and, if we wish, we too can be a part of it.
Temptation, of course, is always present in this work: the temptation of the uprooted to find refuge in myth, to plant the painted tree in painted earth and hope that in this way the foundations can be laid of a home to call ones own; the temptation to renounce the perpetual uncertainty of making, the perpetual reordering of elements which are without prior resonance or significance, in favour of the already made, the already known, of the dream image, complete, coherent, assertive.
‘Because of impatience men were expelled from Paradise,’ Kafka once wrote, ‘because of impatience they do not return.’ The temptations of the artist are always the result of impatience: impatience with the world which will not see what he has made for it; impatience with oneself for failing to find the right objective correlative for the mingled sensations of exhilaration and anxiety which assail one; impatience at the thought that there is not, finally, any refuge from time.
But, set against impatience is trust. Not confidence, not arrogance, not faith, but trust, trust in the slow and silent work of the hand, in the possibilities of paint and canvas, trust, finally, in the world of light and shadow, sunshine and snow, of trees and sea and sky. For him who starts with nothing and expects nothing, who accepts weakness and vulnerability, who has learned to live with the fact that even trees do not last for ever – for such a person everything is always possible. As the uprooted tree testifies to the greater power of the storm, as the cut tree brings into the room at Christmas the smell and feel of the forest, so the uprooted exile brings with him far more powerful feelings of what it means to be rooted in our world than those who have always stayed at home can ever know.
Time and memory, anguish and desire, tug at us and it is necessary to keep diving back into the wreck, going on through the long night, making our temporary refuges and being prepared, when the time comes, to abandon them without regret. No final revelation is at hand but, with trust and patience, something can be made which will speak truthfully of the joys and sorrows of our condition. And that, surely, is enough.