”Stars”

light installation consisted of thousand LED lamps.
Part of ”Engram” project – one man shows:
– Patio Art Center, Łódź, Poland, 2009;
– Chapel Gallery, Center of Polish Sculptures, Orońsko, Poland, 2009 link:
http://archive.rzezba-oronsko.pl/index.php?aktualnosci,240,mariusz_soltysik_engram____

The light of stars and the galaxies, which carries their image into the darkness, has been my fascination since childhood. While drawing star patterns on a window glass – to record their movement – I imagined the look and feel of intergalactic travels. I imagined them without fully grasping the vastness and multifariousness of the cosmic matter. The beauty of the Universe, as seen from the ninth floor of a block of flats, was a further way to escape from the sad reality of socialism.
Since then, I have learnt a bit more about the Universe, but it is still quite difficult to embrace the idea of something limit-less and untouchable. An image of a night sky conceals so much that it is impossible to consider it strictly scientifically or philosophically.
It seems that this idyllic image – of a man in the context of his achievements; of the vastness around our planet, implicating questions of the sense of existence – preserved as a memory trace (engram) would not stand the test when confronted with the reality created by us. And although, I can still watch the beauty of the start light, the world by itself and the human, who creates it, look dwarfish. Freud believed that human megalomania was hurt three times. The first one who did the act was Copernicus, who showed that Earth is not in the centre of the universe. Darwin was second. He pointed out that human race is not the chosen one, but one of many animal species. Finally, there was Freud himself who showed that there is no such thing as autonomous human soul. Human mentality is enslaved by the unconscious and the uncontrollable forces of physiology and the mind. It is worth mentioning here as well Jacques Lacan, in whose opinion a child in order to become a ‘normal’ human must discard its imagined attitude to its mother, as well as its narcissism, so that it is possible for it to take its place in a symbolic order (a structural network of language and social roles defined by the family and environment). Certainly, the above are not novelties. However, through questioning myself, I wonder why they keep absorbing me now. Why does this particular engram come back to me in this context?
The answer is both simple and complex: clear and unclear – just like Quantum Theory. It is simple – because I watch myself ‘grooming’ my daughter for functioning in the society. It is complex because I do not see reasons for doing it. My fantabulous omni-world of ideas and imagination – does not exist – not even on a leash of genes (Richard Dawkins). How to constrain, so called, life drive; or to quote Baudrillard what do you do after the orgy? Baudrillard defines the moment after the orgy as the moment when modernity exploded on us, the moment of liberation in every sphere. What to do when everything spins around dispersing itself with every round. What to do when with every round we lose the values which used to determine the sense. As I have not got answers to these questions, only premonitions, I express the answers through the artwork presented at Engram exhibition.