"Lust is His Flower"
by Marek Bartelik

Galeria Bielska BWA, Bielsko-Biala 2009

I find it absolutely delightful that the Krzysztof Zarebski Retrospective at BWA Galeria Bielska coincides with the centennial of the “Futurist Manifesto” by Filippo Tomasso Marinetti, published in La gazzetta dell’Emilia and reprinted in Le Figaro in February 1909. Although Zarebski has never pretended to be a belated Futurist, and neither critics nor viewers have ever perceived him this way, his works fit well into the iconoclastic tradition of actions and performances initiated by the Futurists and further developed by the generations of international artists involved with the Viennese Actionists, Fluxus, Performance and Body Art. It is the “Futurist Manifesto of Lust” by Valentine de Saint-Point that for me best captures the essence of a philosophy that stands behind Zarebski’s entire oeuvre. De Saint-Point stated provocatively: “Art and war are the great manifestations of sensuality; lust is their flower… Lust excites energy and releases strength.”
The impact of war, and the violence it always causes, on Zarebski’s life is central to his development as an artist. He was born in 1939, graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw in 1968, and left Poland for the United States in 1981. The traumatic events of the twentieth century marked him greatly—without affecting his actions, films, theater sets, installations, drawings, and sculptures in any obvious way. Instead, Zarebski has consistently produced works of intense sensuality and measured drama, tapping into the collective Unconscious while questioning the stable self.
Since the late 1960s, the artist has been using a range of unorthodox materials in his art, including live leeches, sex vibrators, magnetic tapes, and fashion nails—turning them into a Foucaultian Chinese encyclopedia of some sort. His collaboration with Helmut Kajzar is legendary, as is his work with Krystyna Jachniewicz, with whom he joined the Rivington School in New York City after the couple settled down in the US in the early 1980s. This School, initiated by the sculptor Ray Kelly, also included the painter Fred Bertucchi, photographer Toyo Tsuchiya, and another sculptor Tovey Halleck. In his increasingly provocative actions, Zarebski transforms himself into a magician, both adroit and perverse, who tests the limits of our tolerance, while teasing our sensuality and sexuality. For him, staged perversion and lust have become tools of both attraction and sublimation.
Recently, the artist experienced a true comeback in Poland with his exhibition “Erothemes of a Waning Eros” at Galeria Art New Media. Organized on the occasion of Zarebski’s seventieth birthday, the show celebrated the extraordinary vitality of his artistic vision—which is radiantly alive in this retrospective.

Marek Bartelik teaches modern and contemporary art at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Art and Science in New York. He regularly contributes to Artforum.