Faunus Charm. Jerzy Lisak

September 10 – October 4, 2019
Exhibition opening: September 13, 7 p.m.

An exhibition of works by Jerzy Lisak, painter and painting designer of the Oscar-nominated film “Your Vincent”. The exhibition will be accompanied by a screening of the Oscar-nominated animation and a lecture and discussion on the architectural detail of Warsaw’s Praga district.

“The Charm of Faunus” is an exhibition born of the artist’s awareness of the painting matter and his creative maturity. It is the artist’s boldness in his search for the uniqueness inherent in ornaments. The element of crowding plant, animal and anthropomorphic motifs, present in the painting theme, makes it impossible to grasp the whole picture immediately. Beauty and ugliness, comedy and tragedy, realism and fantasy are written in the organic character of Lisak’s paintings. Everything is under the stylistic sign of the grotesque. Using this aesthetic category, the artist reveals his technical skills and finesse in adapting Baroque and Rococo graphic art motifs. The numerous decorative elements in the paintings, such as rocaille, were executed by the artist with a lively and dynamic hand movement. In this case, the expressive method of the artist’s workshop is a will to capture the vitality of the fauna. Effectively guided and realized, the painter’s intention causes the paintings to be filled with movement, bringing drama to the subject of each painting. The atmosphere of strangeness and heterogeneity of the occurring threads makes Lisak’s paintings a constant field of exploration, and catching the relation with the painting is possible only through attentive looking. Jerzy Lisak’s exhibition *The Charm of Faunus* is a desire to restore beauty, technical skills and pleasure of communing with a painting as fundamental artistic values.
“I paint grotesques out of the need to understand their structure, especially the organic form, which fascinates me. I always apply the basic shapes as a rather free hand drawing, which allows me to depart from the pattern, which is for example Gothic or Rococo graphics. The technique used to finish the work, i.e. egg or casein tempera, thanks to its specific properties, makes it possible to refer to the drawing form and at the same time introduces an additional painting aspect. In this way, a new and unexpected visual quality is created, which was not predicted by the original design on paper, as the choice of painterly means and often even of colors is established only during painting. – Jerzy Lisak
During the opening there will be a special choreographic show performed by Wioleta Fiuk and Patryk Gacki from the dance duo Dzikistyl Company. With their unique movement language, the dancers will shift the Faun theme between centuries, musical styles and cultures. The duo’s choreography will follow in the footsteps of Lisak’s painterly duet and the life-giving power of Faunus.
Choreography “Charm of Faunus” is an ideological reference to the foundations of our modernity. The title Faunus and his excesses were the theme of Stephane Mallarme’s poem Afternoon of a Faun from 1876. Then our mythological hero moved to Debussy’s symphony, who, fascinated by the poem, created a musical work of the same title. Consequently, the symphony gave rise to the music of the 20th century. Finally, both works became an inspiration for Waclav Nijinsky, who in 1912 based his ballet choreography musically and thematically on the achievements of the aforementioned masters. Mallarme’s poem, Debussy’s symphony and Nijinsky’s choreography are three masterpieces that initiated the modern era.
The musical setting for the evening will be an impressionistic soundtrack, proposed by Dr. Michal Piekarski.
**Events accompanying the Faunus Charm exhibition**

September 19 (Thursday), 7 p.m. – screening of “Your Vincent” (dir. Dorota Kobiela, Hugh Welchman, 2017) with commentary by painter Jerzy Lisak – painter animator and painting designer of the production nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature Film.
September 26 (Thursday), 6 p.m. – presentation by prof. dr hab. inż. arch. Jadwiga Roguska titled “Detail in 19th and 20th century architecture. “Detail in 19th and 20th century architecture” and a lecture by Jerzy S. Majewski, journalist and Warsaw history expert, “Architectural detail in Praga”, as well as the presentation of the publication “Architectural detail in Warsaw’s Praga district 1850-1939” (edited by prof. dr hab. inż. arch. Jadwiga Roguska, published by Hereditas Foundation, 2018)
Curator: Karolina Kliszewska
Event organizer: Nizio Gallery
Event partner: Hereditas Foundation

Jerzy Lisak (1979) – a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk (2002). He deals with oil painting, tempera painting and drawing, using various painting techniques. He is inspired by Renaissance and Baroque art, which is particularly evident in his grotesques. He explores the alchemical side of painting techniques and uses the results in his works. In 2015-2017 he worked as a painting animator and painting designer in the BreakThru Films team being the author of the largest number of animation shots of the Oscar and Golden Globe nominated production “Your Vincent”. Since 2017 he has been working with Paulina Olowska, with whom he taught at the International Summer Academy of Fine Arts in Salzburg in 2019. Exhibitions featuring Jerzy Lisak: “Loving Vincent: Exhibition” (Noordbrabants Museum s-Hertogenbosch, 2017), “Collage” by Wojciech Zielinski (Szczecin Philharmonic, 2014) , “Surroundings of a Portrait” (State Art Gallery in Sopot, 2009).
Dzikistyl Company – Wioleta Fiuk and Patryk Gacki are dancers and choreographers from Gdansk, Poland. They create in the fields of dance theater, drama theater, musical and popular dance. They are known to a wide audience as winners of the “You Can Dance” and “Got to Dance” programs. On a daily basis they are connected with Musical Theatre in Gdynia, where they dance in the spectacles: “Notre Dame de Paris” and “The Witcher”. They create their own dance theater performances and stage movement for drama plays on stages all over Poland, e.g: Wybrzeże Theatre, Miniatura Theatre in Gdańsk, Lubuski Theatre in Zielona Góra, Bogusławski Theatre in Kalisz or Jaracz Theatre in Olsztyn.

Tuesday – Friday: 10.00 – 17.00
Saturday: 12.00 – 16.00
free entry
Nizio Gallery, ul. Inżynierska 3 lok. 4, 03-410 Warsaw
www.nizio.com.pl / + 48 602 863 485