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1981 -2005 Janusz Mulak
December 24 2006

 WARSAW CENTRAL STATION –  PLATFORM NUMBER ONE

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The video by Janusz Mulak is a unique work of Polish contemporary art. It is not a shallow provocation, a composition aimed at calling out a strong, but short and superficial shake; this fragment of reality really wanders throughout the fields of our memory long after the presentation and gives the creeps, when you think of it more intensively. 'Warszawa Centralna - Platform Number One' evokes Samuel Beckett's 'Endgame': A man dies on our bare eyes. A young man, a beautiful man, a sensitive man, a talented poet and an illustrator. He lies rapped up in rags on a railway station; not unveiled on the platform, but on the recesses of waiting rooms, where the homeless, nameless, people with no future and no past "hit their sacks"; junkies, outcasts, renegades, all unable and unwilling to challenge life. Chris - a well-educated man, took uppers at university. Then he met a girl, fell in love, got married, ran a family business, quit narcotics. Then she died in a car crash leaving him with the children. Chris saw light in drinking. Not long after that, did drugs and hit the streets again. Got the nickname 'Jesus'. Those photos are not arranged - he was real. And now he's dead. Nobody offers help on the stations. Nobody hopes to get it. Nobody interferest .... . How long was he there ? How long was he waiting for death ? Nobody knows. It was too late, when Janusz Mulak found him. The montage is based on a series of static, slowly changing photographs, which, as a form of an artistic expression, imperceptibly enforce the viewer to interact with what he sees. We are touching someone's tragic destiny and asking together with the artist whether it has to have happened so. The whole projection places the viewer face to face with two major questions: Is it the man choosing his fate or the fate executing a sentence ? Is a man's free will just an illusion ?   2005 "Art" Joanna Skoczylas

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The interior of courtyard, one of these where the sky is morę to guess than to see where the light is so faint that it becomes pre-cious and melancolic. Doordisaster, leprous. That is enought to present the painting reflection which is not satisfied with empty formulas. And does not misue dispensible beauty, the urban duli landscape — this is conscious limitation of topie that maybe also {ha way to describe poverty in human dimension. What is the hu-mańity, what is the human being in that space or is it perhaps the way to accuse of inability? That is the painting that Mulak is crea-ting in Poland. Today.

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Jean-Jacques Leveque „MULAK. Galerie Grise, 15 rue Saint Paul, Paris" „Les Nouvelles Litteraires", 3-30 VI11981, nr 2797

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 L'Art Contemporain Polonais - Catalogue Galerie Espace-Temps, Paris, 1989 Barbara Askanas Department Custodian of Modern Art National Museum in Warsaw

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 In the beginning of the seventies the artist was interested in the sphere of the environment. The paintings being composed at this time were abstract where hę decisively challenged a traditio-nal form. Hę used to oppose glittering surfaces painted on aluminum with the big surfaces cove-red by narrow strips of colorful, unpolished materia. Those two types of areas were cut by fissure whereas the light filters through. At the same time hę proposed action in open naturę while being convinced that the observation and the artistic action in natural space releases „the spiritual reaction of unity and identity with naturę". Later on, at the end of the seventies hę returns to the conventional method of painting the picture on flat surface. At first, in the series of works on canvas, hę is close in methods and style to hyperealism. The architecture in its reshaping or its fragments: doors, destroyed windows and leprosy-walls create the urban picture, imposing a reflection of the poverty of human existence in those sorroundings. Three paintings of the Messiah series continue this reflection in a deeper dimension through its importance and greatness. The Messiah figure always appears in the middle of the Iower part of the composition. It is surrounded by two kinds of elements, geometrie or amorfical, localized in the middle of the composition. The expression of chaos is composed by the form abstract in its naturę. At the same time the form is associated with the real image of a dark courtyard and the wali of the house seen in the perspective de sotto insu. Blue, cool and warm colors stimulate the con-tradiction between the natural and supernatural, between the reality and miracle. The guestion is whetherthe Messiah iswillingtosaveand in what kind of the world hę wants to introduce the Law and the Order.

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 DAGENS NYHETER 24-07-1988, STOCKHOLM, Poland at the Town Hal, Karin Bellman ...

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Mulak belongs to most out-standing Polish artists; his works arę to be numbered among the most interesting ones of that exhibition. Mulak achieves his intended effects using mixed techniqu-es. Hę mixes acrylic with oil paints thus obtaining both lu-sters and matts. His painting entitled "Foto" gives an exam-ple of talent and taste in his painting. The house front seems to be unsteady, plasters arę falling o f f; this impression is enhan-ced by the very painting tech-nique as we/1 as by building the form in a specific manner of jagged rhytms and plan. A butterfly suddenly appears on the trunk of a naked wo-man, it fell there from a stran-ge garden. The whole matter of that painting is uniform and can denote a strain of collapse. But vitality of pure and inten-se colours gives a n impression of beauty of the matter itself and of pictorial art as such. The fundamental, however, is the impression as if the painting were composed of torn apart rugged butterfly wings; as if a mask consisting of butterfly ings were superposed onto various parts of the painting in different combinations.



 PLATFORM NR ONE, VIDEOART   VIDEOART, 13 MIN. FLASH 6, SOUND http://mulak.art.pl/video.php?vid=2&page=b




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