(25.04 - 1.06.2014)
His apartment. With narrow windows to the east and the west. With a small corridor. A one bedroom flat in Wrocław in Łaciarska St, at number fifty nine. A studio and an apartment in one. Yet, it also has a different location. Not “entirely somewhere else”, but “also somewhere else”. Not only at that address, but also on the fifty first parallel north. An apartment-observatory. On the fifth floor. On the Northern Hemisphere. At a specific, calculated distance from the Sun. And from the Moon. And among some other solar systems. I don’t know their names. Nobody has ever taught me astronomy, alas. But I’m trying to imagine it. And I can enumerate further points of reference. Points in a space that extends way further than the roofs of the neighbouring houses. Beyond the city. Above the continent. Beyond Cygnus. To Hercules, which he saw from the windows of his only room, year after year, always from spring to autumn. That’s how it is with Cygnus on the Northern Hemisphere. And even further: beyond Orion and its supposedly easily discernible one hundred twenty sun-stars. All these points are the places he determined. Or not determined, but rather noticed, or better saw. He wouldn’t draw maps. He would look and leave a trace of what he saw. A trace which I can follow when I forget to look. Everybody can. Within their own capacity. The more so in loneliness. He saw extraordinary things. Truly exceptional. The sun rising and setting. Simply spectacular. Awe-inspiring. Quite literally. He saw them through his window. A sky colour extravaganza.

Vermillion, cobalt blue, azure, alizarin and carmine. Changing times of the day. Withering flowers. In the apartment-greenhouse. Apartment-laboratory. Apartment-place in the cosmic space. The noble profiles of plants in pots. Their green perfection. Like Riviera amorfofallus. Beautiful and symmetrical. Growing in the room with windows to the east, the room between Orion and Hercules. Given the shortage of space, he stored his early paintings in the kitchen. Not far from the gas rings, the heat damaged the canvasses. He would sometimes prepare food there. He would eat and look at the sun. I know he was looking at it on the first day of May, exactly forty two years ago, throughout half an hour. I can see photographs of the (slightly blurry) May sun spots amid the dark outlines of his kitchen interior. What you see is only a record of occurrences. The associations are a matter of your imagination. Seen or heard from afar, occurrences sometimes don’t seem to matter. Or matter only on the local scale. What would happen to us if the sun hadn’t risen today. Sometimes an occurrence lasts. Repeats. Recurs. Rings constantly. We lose it. We get accustomed. To the hum of the sea. To the movement of Jupiter. We would even get used to the sound of revolving planets. It would perhaps be the first sound we could ever hear. So we would accept that music if only it was playing. If it was playing, he would be recording it.

                       Marika Kuźmicz