“Duality” Sławomir Witkowski

At the Duality exhibition, I will not discuss the problems of the duality of human nature and the world, I will not show the nature of good and evil, light and dark, sacred and profane existing in inseparable connections.  I will not talk about my nature, which can be expressed by recalling Robert Luis Stevenson’s short story “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”.  I will not ineptly tell about myself when I am a monster and when I am an angel, what causes an eruption of rage in me, and what an endless empathy for the world and people.  Others do it briefly, humorously but painfully calling me “an SS man with the soul of a troubadour”.  I will not compare myself in a Kabotian way to a gnostic Demiurge who has in his nature the agency of creating the duality of the world.  Nor will I present an argument and an internal dispute, following in the footsteps of David Hum and Father Mably – what leads the way in human life by reason or feeling?  I will not repeat after Charles Baudelair “I sit and think, laugh and cry, here and there, entangled in the machine of life.  Sometimes happy, other times sad and depressed ”.  I will not … because these are the eternal dilemmas that you all know, each man struggles with them in his day and night cycle, being essentially a small part of this universe.

It is not the subject that is the essence of the Duality exhibition, but a reflection on the duality of the space in which we live here and now.  I do not mean astrophysical parallel worlds, there are certainly many, but the world that determined our fate at the time of our birth, which we are trying to define through our knowledge and life experience.  As a result of the fourth industrial revolution that changes reality before our eyes – its basic feature is ubiquitous digitization – we are moving our lives from the real world to digital clouds providing us with virtual spaces in which we can build our alternative lives.  The pandemic greatly accelerated these processes. Increasingly, thanks to new technologies, people communicate with machines, things and devices, removing contact with other people from their priorities.  Artificial intelligence armed with appropriate algorithms scrupulously and builds us worlds in which we want to live, but which are fiction, a simulation generated on the basis of observing our behavior on the Web.  The more civilized society is, the deeper it is on the other side of the screen of communicators and laptops.  There are more and more of us in the virtual world and less and less of real people.  Artists are subject to the same processes.  Although, due to their low usefulness in the process of increasing the efficiency of production of material goods, i.e. increasing the revenues of global corporations, they have a little more time to look at these processes and speak about them.  Unfortunately, they often divide into “tribes” of adherents of old and new technologies, hitting themselves mercilessly on their heads with the worst epithets.  I am trying to live in harmony in both worlds.  I need a brush with pig bristles as much as I need a digital magic pencil.  That’s the whole reason why I wrote this lengthy argument.Thank you very much to Serhiy Savchenko for inviting me to his gallery.  Serhiy is the perfect embodiment of the idea of ​​Duality, he is a great artist and a dynamic manager promoting other artists!  Thank you, Serhiy.
~Sławomir Witkowski, April 2021, Gdańsk

Catalog of exhibition