Almost one year ago exactly, PL/STL: A Celebration of Polish Poster and Visual Art 1900-Current opened at Fort Gondo Compound for the Arts. That exhibit, curated by artist and musician Chris Smentkowski, introduced St. Louis to the esthetic of the Polish poster: hypnagogic, waggish, scary, gorgeous. Apop Records and the Moolah Theater screened Polish films every week in April, and a few people got doused with buckets of water during the holiday of Lany Poniedzialek, or Wet Easter Monday (which also was part of the show's month-long programming).
One of the artists in that exhibit was internationally known costume/set designer and poster artist Ryszard Kaja. This week, he's in St. Louis for his first North American show, Flora, Phallus, Fauna, an exhibit also curated by Smentkowski, which opens this Saturday at The Hinge. Smentkowski and The Hinge crew—Eileen G'Sell, Lauren Pressler, and Bryan Laughlin—invited us down to the gallery on Good Friday to get a preview and talk to Kaja, who flew into town last weekend with his partner Leszek Jamrozik.
When we arrived, the whole group was gathered around one wall, working through ways of hanging the posters in a way that would not damage the artwork or the wall (The Hinge is located inside an historic West End apartment building, and as Kaja observed, one would no longer be able to match the paint color on the walls should one put a hole in the plaster). There was some funny banter about weak American coffee (Laughlin eventually re-brewed a much stronger pot), and a recapitulation of what it was like to eat an American hamburger for the first time. (Kaja supplied "Boing, boing, boing," sound effects as he explained the bewildering experience of chewing on puffy American hamburger buns, which he said reminded him of sponges.) Eventually everyone settled in the front room, where a stack of posters shipped fromGaleria Plakatu Wrocław was spread out over the table. True to the title of the show, images of plants, animals, and insects abounded; Kaja's work also has a playful, sly eroticism to it, which surfaces in surprising ways, including on the exhibition poster.
"That's me," Kaja said, pointing out the figure with the umbrella, sailing across the water from Poland to St. Louis. "Why the octopus tentacle?" Laughiln asked. "It’s phallic," he explained. "Falliczny. "
Kaja uses every sort of material when he works—the list from his artist's statement includes "pen, pencil, ink, color ink, gouache, coffee grounds, tea, ash..." He also uses images of the people, animals, plants, buildings, and environments he encounters in his daily life (which these days, involves a lot of travel with Jamrozik). In fact, Kaja even predicted objects from St. Louis might turn up in his paintings, maybe the gallery's jadeite coffee cups, or the fearless squirrels darting around on the sidewalks (which charmed him only a shade less than cardinals).
Because of his organic, matter-of-fact way of working, Kaja has a characteristic style that has nothing to do with trends. (Smentkowski describes it as a "Slavic Baroque esthetic.") He also drafts and paints everything by hand, a highly unusual practice for a 21st century poster artist. In fact, when a 2010 poster advertising the opening of an aviation museum floated to the top of the pile ("In Poland, we sometimes build new buildings," Kaja said dryly), it warranted mention because it was one of the few instances where he'd used a digital image. "I prefer everything to be made by hand," Kaja explained, a fact he alluded to in a series of posters for a 2011 retrospective of his work, which were splashed with colorful "painter's butterflies," with bodies made of pens and tubes of paint.
Kaja's work is also—of course—Polish to the core. It's filled with references to the country's history (e.g.., the black wings of Hussar soldiers), and the medium itself is a huge part of Polish culture. Even from its inception in the late 19th century, when Polish artists worked in international styles like Art Nouveau, they wove in references to national traditions and folklore. But it wasn't until World War II, Smentkowksi explained, that things got really interesting. Poland became a Communist country; the state commissioned propaganda posters, but by the 1950s and '60s, they stopped caring what the actual imagery was. So artists (Kaja's father Zbigniew was among them) took the Polish poster "to the next, bizarre, unrestricted, and surreal level of self-expression and artistic interpretation," Smentkowksi said. The world's first poster museum opened in Wilinów in 1968, and contemporary artists, including Kaja, are still inspired by the work made during that "golden age." In this show, Kaja has works paying tribute to both his mother, Stefania, who was a ceramicist and painter, as well as to his father, specifically an image of a peacock that's he's known for.
"I used his graphics," Kaja said. "Many people forget about my father, and now in December, at the National Museum, there will be a huge exhibition of his work. For me, it's very important....he's very much in the style of the' 60s. But he died very young."
As for Kaja the younger, his work can't be pigeonholed into any particular era, any particular school. "People say, 'Oh, I like Minimalist art, oh, I like....' No. I like the person," Kaja said. "Some people speak in a language which I like: Velasquez, Goya. And some people speak in a language that for me is too difficult, or too strange. So maybe they are great. But they are not good for me."
Kaja finds his inspiration from non-painters, too, including filmmaker Werner Herzog, and novelist Bohumil Hrabal. Though Kaja doesn't literally speak Hrabal's langauge—he was Czech—the two definitely speak the same artistic language, and Kaja and Jamrozic delight in telling the story of the day they met the writer in a bar. (Kaja shook like a nervous teenager when asking for his autograph; Hrbal was in a lousy mood and told him to go away. When Jamrozi told him what was what, how much Kaja loved him, and well, shame on him, the trio eventually ended up spending the afternoon together, drinking.) There's a poster in this show for the stage adaptation of three of Hrabal's short stories, "Mme Titanik," which features a rosy-cheeked woman with a slight case of avoirdupois, sitting in a bathtub. "She is a woman at war with herself," Kaja sighs. "Every day, she goes to the butcher, and buys a sausage. She hangs it in the toilet, thinking she will let it dry out...." But every day, her willpower breaks down, and she eats it, and grows bigger and bigger. This what Kaja loves about Hrbal, and what he tries to put in his own work: in his phrasing, "simple stories about simple people," that somehow also transcend the mundane.
Smentkowski says the key to understating Kaja's work is "how masterfully he uses subjective truths." In a travel poster for a Polish village, the foreground is dappled with white dots—a field of flowers. In another 2012 tourism poster, giant black cats with zippy red whiskers lurk in an autumn landscape, a visual pun for Kocie Gora, the "Cat Mountains." ("It's only in name," Kaja explained. "There are no cats there." No naturally occurring cats, Jamrozik corrected. Technically, they do live in the villages nearby.) And for a series of posters for thematic movie nights—including "an evening with rubbish Italian spaghetti westerns"—Kaja's images elegantly (but hilariously) get the gist of each genre, whether Japanese monster movies or superhero films. But this idea of "subjective truth" also comes through in Kaja's most tender work; when he paints portraits of himself and Jamrozik, like "Two Gentlemen Traveling," a poster he made when the pair showed some of their travel photos, they wear matching bowler hats, and though they have huge, soft eyes (Jamrozik's peering out from behind his signature wire-rimmed glasses), they have no mouths, as if to suggest that they know each other so well, there is hardly any need for talking.
"Art is important because it should explain everything which is not possible to explain by science," Kaja said. "So, what is out of the world. What is not possible to touch in the scientific world." Like Hrabal's stories, which Kaja says taught him a universal truth that you will never find in a hard science textbook: "Everything sad has something funny. And everything funny has a touch of sadness."
Just like last year, a Polish Cinema Series runs concurrent with the exhibit. You can watch a trailer for that here; all films start at 8pm, and are free. This Thursday, April 4, Apop Records (2831 Cherokee) screens Diabel (The Devil, 1972) by Andrzej Zulawski; on April 11, they'll show Czesc, Tereska (Hi, Tereska, 2001) by Robert Glinski. And on April 25, The Moolah Theatre and Lounge (3821 Lindell) shows Pociag (Night Train, 1959) by Jerzy Kawalerowicz. Flora, Phallus, Fauna opens at The Hinge on Saturday, April 6, with a reception from 6-9 pm.; the artist will be present. For more information, visit thehingestl.com.
