Jan Czerwinski: Orbita

“… everything inside a skull comes into existence and disappears just like in space comets, epochs, everything emerges from and then decays inside the skull’s imagination.” (Kasimir Malewitsch)

Jan Czerwinski is especially interested in those things at the edge of our experience or at the fringes of our world, or that are a kind of symbol for just this. Hence in his work, he has been preoccupied with skulls for years, with moons for a long time, and more recently also with the term “observatory”.
The observatory, located on a mountain ridge between heaven and earth, expands our view of the outer worlds. Looking into a telescope means looking into the great beyond in the sense of experiencing a limit of what we are capable of perceiving. Like looking into the outer cosmos, looking into one’s own universe inside one’s skull always means looking into darkness. And yet the longer he looks inside it, the more he will see. Painting thus is a kind of observatory for inner worlds, it enables him to make special, personal observations visible to others.
The bones of the skull are the edge where the outer and inner lives meet. The skull is the symbol of the transition between life and death par excellence, the edge we cannot see beyond off, yet offering us room for projecting fears and desires precisely because of this.
Skulls are silent just as painting is a silent activity, which is why they put a spell on him. His paintings are not supposed to be chatty, or cause striking dread or appalled screams. They are supposed to be more of a deep, barely audible rumbling. Uncannily-beautiful bass sounds, so to speak.
Skulls represent the end of time as we can perceive it; they represent complete deceleration, not hectic busyness (which is another analogy of painting in relation to the media’s landslide of images).
It is similar with moons and asteroids. Superficially, they are not attractive: they are not inhabited and therefore change less than an inhabited planet. Stoically, they follow their orbit, waiting for a meteor to hit them every 10.000 years to reshape how they look. Magnificent craters, ridges and mountain ranges come into being. I have produced extensive works on the similarity of the surfaces of moons and skulls. (…)