Joanna Rojkowska

"The sun had not yet risen. The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it. Gradually as the sky whitened a dark line lay on the horizon dividing the sea from the sky and the grey cloth became barred with thick strokes moving, one after another, beneath the surface, following each other, pursuing each other, perpetually." Virginia Woolf, Waves

There is some poetics in a slow, steady movement of rising and falling waves, their coming forward and retreating, building up and dissolving into a shapeless mass. There is some poetics in waiting for their appearance, in yearning, even finding short-lived thrill when looking how they come to shape and immediate sadness when they fall into shapeless mass. Their coming indicates imminent going, their absences - imminent presence. Infinite stability in constant, repeatable changes: there is music to waves. There is also a rhythm in their slow rising and falling, soundless music: music heard only by gaze, not by ears.

"God, The Soul, The Spirit, Life, Religion, Technology, Art, Science, The Intellect, Weltanschauung, Labour, Movement, Space, Time, equals White Square" - claimed Malevich in Suprematist Mirror. Twenty years later Albert Einstein translated the above manifesto into the language of mathematics’ coming up with the most famous equation of all time: E = mc² - energy equals mass, times square of light. White Square thus, came back again embracing space and time, speed and immobility, light and darkness, matter and spirit, this time in a scientific, calculated way.

Philosophers nowadays do not tend to ask questions to which they cannot find a rational answer. They do not try to touch White Square because they do not wish to be touched by it. Metaphysics of light could happen only then, when people had courage to acknowledge human inherent blindness. The era of visionary philosophers is now gone, buried deeply in materialist encounters instead. Today philosophers’ dreams are withdrawn. Nowadays visions are the domain of artists and madmen. It takes a madman, an artist to envision that light is a wave is matter.

Light cast on the objects, delaminates their homogenous, solid blocks into two separate elements revealing their ghostly nature and bringing duality of the world from the realm of philosophical ideas into the realm of physical presence, provocatively challenging materialist claims, announcing duel everywhere, in every street and market square, on tables laid with tableware, on windowsills, on riverbanks, on pavements and on desert sand, and while the physical part scrutinised by light brightens up and sharpens, the invisible so far, spiritual one - comes to vision as a dark, flat, cut-out-like shape attached to its material counterpart. A stroke of light has the power to transform every lump of matter into a disputant participating in philosophical debate who, like Diogenes challenging Eleatics on the streets of ancient Athens, challenges the materialist point of view not through the intellectual argumentation, but by presenting shadowy spirits of objects to the eyes of sceptics until clouds cover the sun with a white veil, dispersing shadows and forcing objects back to their natural muteness and indifference of still matter.

Exhibition Re: Search, Dyson Gallery, 2014