Everything that exists has a secret.
All kinds of creative activities, including those related to the visual arts, are an attempt to get closer to what is contained between the lines, or rather between the images, as Michelangelo Antonioni himself once put it in an interview. Namely, to what is unrecorded, unarticulated, unspoken expressis verbis. The closer we are able to get, the stronger we are able to grasp life, to snuggle more firmly into its embrace. When recording certain traces of reality, one has to accept the fact that what is most essential is unrecordable, essentially impossible to grasp and subject to direct sensory viewing.
The inexhaustible richness of nature, juxtaposed with the inadequacy and poverty of languages or other attempts at description, poses no small problem on the road to understanding it. To find out, it is enough to personally go to the forest for a short walk. Finding a gap, a crevice, to at least partially overcome the problem of the incompatibility of the message with the enormity of reality is quite a challenge. In the end, there is no other way than a solitary, intimate walk into the infinite majesty of nature's pulsating heart - a silent contemplation of the inexpressible.
Exactly at this point, at the interface: man-nature-universe, there is an interweaving of various forms of cognition and subtle interrelationships, as well as their multidimensional, complex interference. These forms of cognition construct a wide field of meanings for various orders, not only the overt order, subject to visual perception, but also the hidden order, in which a deeper sense of existence is contained.
There is an old saying that says that whoever wants to see the invisible must penetrate very deeply into the visible.
Krzysztof Szlapa, author of the series In Love with Nature consistently develops in his work a way of (photographic) description of the world that coincides with this view, and one of the most important, if not the most important, areas of creative exploration is the widely understood relationship of man to nature, and perhaps nature to man, an attempt to get closer to the Mystery. We are talking about intuition developed through inner listening with the support of personal, psychophysical perception.
The author aims to answer the indicated questions through the "procedure" of capturing with the inner eye the subtleties of nature's visual chords, harnessing the extensive arsenal of the photographic imaginarium to help in various projects. The forest inevitably constitutes a kind of sanctuary for this versatile artist, which he gave expression to in his earlier initiatives, eminently touching on analogous issues. Of the larger projects, it is worth mentioning, for example, the long-term, extensive project entitled "The Forest. Tree Key, realized together with Sosnowiec painter Marek Przybyla, where the artists paid a beautiful joint tribute to trees in this project.
It can be said that in constructing the narrative of his photographic stories, Krzysztof Szlapa uses a kind of pictorial dependent speech, where the protagonist in this approach is a certain visually coherent ecosystem. Because of this, we will probably never be able to figure out what is ultimately the author's voice, and what will be an obvious superstructure of the interpreter-viewer. But here's the good news. The artist deliberately leaves a margin of insufficiency in this thoughtful way. He invites the viewer to join the "game", to actively dialogue with the photographic work.
The trees in Szlapa's photographs - those dignified architects of forest backwoods, gargantuan giants gracing the inaccessible areas of the sky with the tips of their crowns - seem to submit to the eye of the photographer's camera, revealing their closely guarded secrets and mysteries.
It is said that trees - at least those proudly looking up to the sky, stately, soaring - are the link between the cosmos and the earth. They are also the seat of supernatural forces. The author meticulously exploits this ancient knowledge, absorbing it into the viscera of his self in order to later make an attempt to transpose it to the surface of the painting.
Trees have their own body language - just like people. Each is unique and has an individual posture, gesture. Just look at how much we can tell by looking at their posture!
We can sometimes - embracing with a tender and attentive gaze - see a tree that smiles, leading its branches upwards, towards the light. Or a tree that is just sad, weathered, crouched. A suffering tree, a moribund tree.
In this context, it is worth recalling the words of Veronika Dabrowska, a fascination with nature, who has an extremely profound experience of contact with trees:
The soul particle coming from the dawn of the creation of the world delights me and connects me to the space of ancient truths. Trees maintaining unbroken threads of love connections with the natural world are the part of it that has not also lost the thread of connection with the Earth and the Source of existence. I immersed myself in my tree part and discovered a world full of friends full of connections to the cosmos through which beautiful knowledge flows like fiber optics.
Trees are also worth listening to. There are photographers who do just that. Author Viewpoint undoubtedly counts among this group of artists. Listening, in this case, refers to an attitude of openness to what is in front of us, integrating ourselves, "establishing oneness" with the space we are in and which we wish to contemplate, which, by the way, is close to Zen tradition and practice. Exactly in such moments the most wonderful photographs are created. "Listening" to the world, not just seeing it, is part of the photographic craft. This only seemingly constitutes a paradox.
How does the forest resonate, how do its individual structural fragments vibrate, how does it speak to us, how does it communicate? Finally, how do we grasp its fractal nature of infinity yet limitation?
A satisfying answer to these questions could be the words of Edgar Allan Poe:
Those who dream during the day are aware of things that elude those who dream only at night.
Experiencing nature in this way, that is, in a state of deepened awareness and meditative concentration, we have a chance to hear the trees sing.
However, the music of trees can also become quite a tangible, direct experience. It is known that each tree generates different sounds. It therefore has its own unique energetic "fingerprint". After all, an aspen tree vibrates differently, a beech or birch tree trembles in a different way. Each tree cries and each rejoices in its own way.
When you put your ear to the tree and stir your imagination a bit, you can hear the osmotic course of water in the capillaries of the trunk in concentration.
The leaves also sound different when they are juicy, young, green and completely different when they become dry, withered.
Reaching into the deepest depths of my own memory, I can still hear within myself the sound of the foliage of the lofty poplar trees growing within the confines of my grandmother's house, along the fence bordering the nearby dirt road. These sounds, sometimes sparkling my ears with subtle pianissimo, at other times resonating with the dense hum of a listicle fortissimo, recorded and remembered in early childhood, stuck with me and will probably remain with me until my death. I associate them with coziness, safety, home, warmth, because they were, as it were, nature's "musical backdrop" for the amazing grandmotherly stories, filling the chamber and the child's imagination on windy, cool autumn evenings.
To some extent, some of the works of the series In Love with Nature They evoke in me that childhood joy, carefree and fascination with the mystery of nature. At the same time, it is amazing why we remember certain things from an early age, for decades, and with unheard of precision, extremely vividly, while others slip away, blur, fade, dim.
It is also worth stopping for a moment to do justice to the complementary, minor forest structures of Krzysztof Szlapa's visual cosmos - a mysterious mélange of innumerable leaves, spears, twigs, stems, vines, flowers, growths or grasses, cuddled tenderly in the soft silence of the undergrowth.
In their unheard-of feast of shapes, spots and hues, they seem to do the forest honors, strongly flexing their muscles, exposing their unearthly charms before the lens of a vigilant and sensitive spectator susceptible to their advances.
It is impossible not to appreciate the fascinating language of micro-events manifested in the subtle drawing of spots, the softness of values and transitions of gray, in the richness of shapes of this unheard-of arsenal of twisted, twisted or connected in impossible ways powerful roots, trunks and uproots or limp and delicate stems, shoots, vittles. We alternate between stately, age-old, at other times with young, supple structures.
The selective use of depth of field further enhances the expressive dreaminess of the message, portraying an unusual fairy-tale setting, despite the fact that the images have been distilled from the most real reality. The consciously used aesthetic expression of pictorial provenance is a significant distinguishing feature and common denominator of the entire series.
Light creating the world In Love with Nature - A record of the presence of matter in which it has imprinted its mark, which is also a kind of author's trademark - along with countless reflections, penetrations, refractions, constantly pulsating, trembling and vibrating in the abyssal network of myriads of nervatio, constructing translucent, twinkling stained glass windows in the Cathedral of Nature.
So - in photographic representations In Love with Nature, the soul of nature and the language of its description form a duo of homeomorphic indistinguishability, to use an adequate formulation from the language of mathematics. Moreover, the creator revises in passing the view associated with Aristotle's idea of the scala naturae, Where nature is merely a background, and man holds custody of the top of the ladder of existence. The classically understood world order is negated by the artist.
Thus, actual as well as mental wandering into the land of trees is akin to collecting sights, sounds, smells, sensations, all the wonderful singing and harmony of the forest, although the image itself seems too flawed to be able to carry this arsenal of sensations.
Jerzy Orawski
Krzysztof Szlapa Was born in 1987 in Katowice, Poland. Artist photographer. Author of eleven solo exhibitions and participant in many group exhibitions, since 2014 co-curator in the photographic Gallery Pustej cd. in Jaworzno, in 2014-2019 curator of the art gallery Za Szybą in Katowice, since 2013 member of the Union of Polish Artists Photographers Silesian District, where he serves as secretary of the board. Scholarship holder of the Marshal of the Silesian Voivodeship in the field of culture in 2017 (the Widziadła project on the Upper Silesian conurbation). Winner of the award for a young artist named after Anna Chojnacka for the best individual exhibition. Author of presentations at the 4th and 6th Analog Photography Festival 2018 and 2020 and the Silesian Photo Marathon 2017. Lecturer of photography courses of ZPAF OŚ and the Open University of the University of Silesia. Masterclass presenter at the Silesian Museum as part of the "City in Process" project. Editor of the annual photographic catalogs of the Empty Gallery cd. since 2014. Author of the albums "Within sight". 2017 (published by grupakulturalna.pl) and "Transformations" 2021 (published by ZPAF OŚ). Involved participant in photographic creative groups: School of Vision, Czech-Polish Group 999, Silesian Group FOTOGRAPHY. Initiator of many cultural events popularizing artistic photography such as: exhibition openings, workshops and author's meetings in cooperation with various institutions such as BWA Katowice, Museum of History of Katowice, Silesian Science Festival of the University of Silesia. He lives in Katowice and works at the Krzysztof Kieslowski Film School on a daily basis.
