Rafał Czajka
Born in 1986.
What is the competition about? “Geppert” is above all a review of artistic attitudes, in which painting is but a pretext for development, and the art of the finalists does not even have to be painting as such. I am a good example of that as the 2009 prize-winner. Since I do not work with young artists on a daily basis, in a way I had a fairly limited field of selection, so I decided to present just one artist, but one with whom I identify, confident about his choices and the artistic language he uses. Rafał Czajka comes from Zielona Góra, where he studied at the Institute of Fine Arts, to graduate from the Faculty of Graphic Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw in Zygmunt Januszewski’s studio. He currently lives and works in Warsaw.
Why have I decided to present this artist? Mainly because of the pattern of experiencing art in which I was, and still am, involved myself – the relationship of art and the city, the Internet, without the white cube of the gallery. In his artistic career, Rafał uses a method which begins with painting in the street, and then goes in the strictly digital direction. The city as exhibition space in the physical sense is unnecessary, even redundant here, as the computer becomes the main medium, and the Internet – exhibition space.
But where is painting in all this? As I said before, painting is a pretext for artistic search, which would not be possible in the form presented here without the experience of painting in its literal sense. The interdependence is based on the relationship between two fields of presenting art which are alternative to the traditionally understood exposition – city space and the Internet. Painters, graphic and street artists create their pictures in the street, but the Internet is their final medium, through which they reach broader audiences.
Services like Fotolog.com, Myspace, Facebook or Tumblr.com are the major media for contemporary urban artists. It is a short way from posting works on the Internet to questioning the necessity of physical work with painting when the artwork is ultimately in digital form. For young artists, the Internet portals begin to replace galleries, perhaps for the same reason why at some point critics decided to run blogs, or maybe because it is simply difficult to hang animated pictures – the GIF images – on the wall.
Rafał Czajka is a romantic and critical artist. His romanticism is in the visual side, which refers to the codes of pop culture from the early 1990’s, the time of technological revolution accompanied by cultural rebellion manifested by techno music. It was a period of adolescence, carefree joy and experimenting, the time we all longingly reminisce about. Interestingly, in the 90’s the technological imperfection did not allow to spread our wings, whereas today most of us function in a global network, with access to unlimited amounts of information, and the division into a real and virtual world does not seem to be valid anymore.
His critical attitude results from the visual code based on omnipresent corporate iconography and branding. He is fairly straightforward in expressing his views on personal freedom, commercialization of culture and the neo-liberal dictatorship of profit obliterating the borderlines between active culture and big business hidden behind entertainment. One of Czajka’s collages makes a parallel between the face of Saint Teresa from Bernini’s famous sculpture and the logo of Nike – both signs are mutually pervasive in their sheer popularity. The amount of images we are daily exposed to on the Internet is alarming, institutions like copyright become more and more blurred, and analytical sampling defines the young generation. To sum up, Rafał Czajka is not a painter anymore, but the process of transition from the street to the Internet by means of painting, i.e. real alternatives to traditional galleries, is interesting and is becoming a common practice these days. That is why I believe it deserves to be presented and further analysed.
Sławek ZBK Czajkowski
