Diploma

Jacek Dominiczak, dr , architect
The Faculty of Architecture and Design
Academy of Fine Arts in Gdansk
Targ Weglowy 6, 80-836 Gdansk

I would like to thank from the bottom of my heart for inviting me to reviewing Krzysztof Iwin's works. I will repeat again what I said in my previous review at the Faculty of Painting and Art: crossing boundaries of specialization is always the sign of our common courage to have a creative conversation. In my review I try to take up dialogue with Iwin's Works. I will present it in three parts. The first part, entitled phenomenon, will describe the impression Iwin's paintings made on me when I saw them for the first time. The second part; conversation, is the reflections on the meeting with the Author's of the works. The third part is deliberations on the background of the topic of his dissertation entitled "About freedom."

Since I was taught by phenomenologists that I perceive the world through emerging world phenomena, through flashes similar to the ones which I make striking a match against a box, I have been always curious what emotions every new painting will arouse in me. When I was going into the studio of ASP in order to see Krzysztof Iwin's works for the first time, at first I saw gathered canvas, frames and easels. Inside I saw a calm figure of the Author. After greeting him, I looked at his painting - first, second, third. You know this feeling: your brain, your consciousness, and finally the language you speak look for well-known emotions, terms and words in order to describe what gets through to us. My body and mind thought about the word sadness. Yes - I see the paintings which contain sadness. As if non-verbal, picture definition of sadness. Unlike fear, this sadness has in itself stop, peace and silence; it has precision causing strange sensitiveness to the pain of a soul; it has unreality or even better: deformation of reality which in short moments of distancing releases the feeling of the outside world's poetics.
Being inside the sadness of Iwin's painting, I start to realize how precise the painting must be so that the match flash of the painting phenomenon does not go out in the moment of banality, painting bungle, technical imperfection. But I praise Krzysztof Iwin's work. I praise it since the emotion caused by his painting lasts, because the painting can keep this emotion. There are care and attention in them which are necessary to keep the fire of the match for some time. For this long moment, the matter of Iwin's painting withdraws, becomes transparent - it helps feel.

I thought that conversation with Krzysztof Iwin will concern the phenomenon of the meeting of a student and a professor, the meeting of two painters who differ from each other in age, knowledge and experience. I thought that I would write about the significance of the fascination for the master's work. Or maybe of the value of continuing what is worth remembering. I thought that I would refer my review to Colin Rowe's words which I quoted in my last essay of Dialogue City: If there is no hope without prophecy, there cannot be communication without memory.¹
Krzysztof Iwin emphasizes his identity. He says that his meeting with Maciej Swieszewski is the meeting of "two people who think of painting similarly". He says about "the similarity of subjects and forms"; however, He emphasizes that his paintings are not "inspired by the professor's works". Iwin says about the opposite direction of inspiration into his inside, into his, as he says, unconsciousness.
It is interesting: in the situation of meeting, Iwin opts for loneliness. He emphasizes that his painting is his own, that it serves him, that the motive for painting is "the satisfaction from structure, colour" and his own "pleasure". Being asked which word describes his painting the best, Krzysztof Iwin, after thinking for a while, says: "sincere, it is sincere".
We do not always believe, or we do not want to believe, that we often live and work being unconscious of the paradigm of culture which surrounds us. Krzysztof Iwin treats his painting existentially. He chooses satrism journey inside himself in order to find there his originality, far from the world and people. He opts for heideggerian, lonely authenticity. He might not have reached it yet as it necessitates the consciousness of the paradigm of the external world, as this consciousness forms an individual person. If the paradigm of culture seems to be between existentialism and dialogism, the conversation with Krzysztof Iwin enables me to understand that his artistic work is part of existentialism: Iwin chooses authenticity, rejecting the possibility of the authenticity of meeting.

I would not write about all these things if Iwin's master's dissertation did not concern freedom. A deep existential conception of freedom emerges from the abundance of quoted passages of texts. Freedom is defined as freedom-from (something) and freedom-to (something). Every time it refers to an individual person who is free from the world; free from other people and who is motivated by freedom-to his artistic work.
Dialogic philosophy describes the sphere of freedom which is defined this way: it closes it in human inside, in the single life at one's own home, living for pleasure which one has for themselves just the same as Iwin derives pleasure from painting. But dialogism - willingness to take up a dialogue - necessitates leaving your own retreat, going beyond the house, opening to others. This opening, as Emmanuel Levinas' works show, necessitates making a decision to subordinate freedom to ethics since ethics rules the meeting of two separate freedoms.
Enjoying Krzysztof Iwin's paintings and pictures, at the same time, I am curious about the moment in his artistic works; when - out of curiosity and his own choice - he will decide on such opening. The presented paintings and pictures superbly meet the conditions of diploma paper.

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¹ Colin Rowe i Fred Koetter, Collage City. MIT 1990, s.49.