Alfred Lenica, STATE OF TENSION, 1976

56,0 x 46,0 cm - oil, canvas signature p.d.: Lenica

signed on the opposite side on canvas: A. Lenica | Warsaw | 55 x 46 | State of tension | 1976



Created in 1976, State of Tension represents the most appreciated, late period in Alfred Lenica's work. It took the artist - a musician by training - nearly thirty years to develop an individual and at first glance recognizable painting formula. It was a path of formal exploration and technological experimentation: from strong inspiration by the works of Picasso and surrealism in the spirit of Giorgio de Chirico, through the creation of the first Tascist painting in Polish art, to figuration in accordance with socialist realist doctrine and a return to abstraction. The mature vision of painting crystallized at the beginning of the 1960s, most often referred to by Lenica as abstract surrealism, was characterized - in addition to the lack of figuration and the metaphorical-surreal idea - by the author's technique, a peculiar biologism of forms, links with music and the integrity of the title with the image. It was described in detail by Bożena Kowalska: He covered the canvas with several successive layers of paint of different colors: from the lightest valor to the darkest. The last, top layer was usually black or dark brown. The artist also prepared peculiar "tools" cut out of cardboard or thick paper, with which he used a precisely sensed method of picking up the intended layers of paint and uncovering shallower or deeper layers of paint. Using this method, undefined forms, luminous, saturated with color or metallic shiny, appear as if extracted from the murky spatial depths. These are usually swirling strands, almost biological shapes, similar to shells, jellyfish, skeletons, metal ornaments, or to nothing, known to the eye, similar. They crowdedly fill the picture plane, or appear sparingly, in moderation. (...) most often they are clusters of unidentified elements, giving only to the viewer's imagination - in accordance with the creator's intention - a variety of associative possibilities. All these forms are charged with energy, dynamic, they seem to expand beyond the edges of the images, or glide through space bursting with explosion. (B. Kowalska, Alfred Lenica. Painter of reverie, elements and music [in:] Alfred Lenica, collective work edited by B. Gawrońska-Oramus, Warsaw 2014, pp. 25-26)

In the presented painting, the biomorphic forms pushing against each other - virtuosically juxtaposed in terms of color - are responsible for the incredible dynamism and expression of the composition. The result is a work that is simultaneously decorative and moving, content-wise ambiguous. A natural consequence of interacting with it seems to be the title "state of tension". Monika Małkowska, commenting on the painter's retrospective at the Arsenal City Gallery in 2002, saw in this tension the emotion that defines Lenica's art: Alfred Lenica's paintings are characterized by (...) ambiguity. They can be perceived as joyful, celebrating the charms of life, even hedonistic. However, it is equally possible to find in them dramas, spiritual dilemmas, struggling with the hardships of existence (...) I noticed that their most important feature is the enormous emotional tension. One would like to say - emotional fortissimo. (M. Malkowska, Remarks on the work of Alfred Lenica, "Gazeta Malarzy i Poetów" 2002, no. 1 (47), p. 42.)





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Alfred Lenica (Pabianice 1899 - Warsaw 1977) studied drawing and painting privately in the studios of Artur Hannytkiewicz and Piotr Kubowicz in Poznań (1925-1928). In the 1930s he painted figurative paintings, referring in style to Cubism. A little later he succumbed to the influence of Surrealism, which, leaving aside the years of Socialist Realism, would become his most serious area of painterly exploration. Since the mid-1940s, he maintained regular contacts with the circle of the "Cracow Group" and was friends with Jerzy Kujawski. After moving to Poznan, in 1947 he became a co-founder of the avant-garde group "4F+R" (paint, form, fantasy, texture + realism). He is the author of the first Polish Tasist painting (Paints in Motion, 1949, tempera). During the period of Socialist Realism, he joined the mainstream of official art, working simultaneously as an organizer of artistic life, president of the Poznañ District of ZPAP (1948-1950) and at the same time head of the Studio of Visual Arts there. At the end of the 1950s, he moved to War-szawa and also here, until 1969, held managerial positions in ZPAP. In the second half of the 1950s, he again - after the experiments of the 1940s - practiced informel, painting eagerly using the dripping technique. Around 1958, he developed an individual, distinctive style of swirling, colorful, sometimes calligraphic forms that dynamically filled the fields of paintings. He created them using a technique akin to surrealist decalcomania. This style became the artist's trademark for the rest of his life. In his paintings he did not shy away from shapes referring to natural forms (his painting was called "biological"), and in the 1970s he sometimes included figural motifs in his compositions. The artist's retrospective exhibition was held at the Zachęta Gallery in Warsaw in 1974.