Jan TARASIN (1926 - 2009), Fragment, 1980

oil, canvas; 62 x 50 cm;
Signed and dated p. d.: Jan Tarasin 80;
On the reverse, author's description: JAN TARASIN / 1980 / "FRAGMENT".

PROVENANCE:
- private collection, Poland
- collection of Ewa Pełka
- directly from the artist

Rarely do we have to deal with an artist̨ freely expressing himself̨ in many fields of art such as painting, drawing, graphics, literature. An artist with broad horizons, both intellectual reaching from Pieter Paul Bruegel's painting to philosophy and Far Eastern art. Jan Tarasin simplifies the surrounding world to a sign or rhythm, drawing on the earliest inspirations, which arę for example, the laws and mechanisms governing nature. Such an extensive search for themes stems̨ from the artist's conviction that European culture has closed̨ itself within the limited circle of the philosophy of anthropocentrism (a view that regards man as the center and goal of the universe) and European cultural codes.
Jan Tarasin, despite his use of synthetic forms, builds complex, thoroughly thought-out, re-constructed compositions. It seems̨ that he is preoccupied with semantics in the field of painting. In the artist's paintings, signs and symbols placed on the canvas, seem like carelessly thrown blobs of paint. Is this in fact the case, or are they studies of the kinetics of bodies and objects, or research conducted with a microscope? From the deconstruction of the object, the Records, Dynamic Phases, Magazines - that is, Jan Tarasin's series of canvases - are formed. The painter's paintings force us to abandon order or rational thinking, in favor of new cognitive experiences and independent shaping of the environment. The consequence, both of the creative method and the broadening of the cognitive horizon, can be the desire to thoroughly investigate whatever seems interesting. Hence the result of Jan Tarasin's painterly studies of individual fragments of paintings, as documented in the offered work, as well as other canvases just titled Fragments, Situations, Complications, Sequences.