Clichés 1 

Three monotypes published under the Klisze title (1980-1981) by Tomasz Struk are the works of an artist, who uses art as a way to consider time forms of recording its material traces. In Klisze, which combines painting and graphic techniques, Struk used fragments of sea photographs, with paint streaks left by a thick paintbrush or a painting knife guided by a free gesture. As a result, the artist captured a double trace of a bygone moment – the moment of the artist’s painting gesture and the moment of the waves crashing against the sea shore. The motif of sea waves has been very significant and frequently referred to in Struk’s works. As he said himself, the time spent on the seashore, staring at the water convinced him that ‘reality is a change, an indivisible movement in which the past and the present constitute one whole.’ A gesture accopanying the creation of the piece, which is another important element of Struk’s works, bringing them closer to the action painting and process oriented art, marks the presence of the artist – his trace, notes on the graphic score. Thanks to this, he has created a palimpsest, a multi-layered text reconstructing bridges between distant events in time and space. For Tomasz Struk, the form of a painting is not a representation, but rather a discovery of memory. He also used frottages of prehistoric rocks in his paintings or incorporated them into his compositions, thus combining traces of two times – the past and the present that is already fading away. Struk has followed the idea of Plato who likened the functioning of memory to wax tablets, which are used to imprint our thoughts.

Marlena Chybowska-Butler