Opera Proibita / Jacek (Adam Dudek)
is a video projection which involves a synchronically recorded image depicting close-ups of fragments of the singer ’s body. We see the vibrating larynx, the crinkling skin, the texture of the flesh. We also know that this is not an anonymous body. The image of the defragmented body is supplemented by the sound of the extraordinary soprano of Jacek Laszczkowski.
In Adam Dudek’s installation the performer, usually located some distance from the audience, is revealed in photographic detail, becoming an abstract composition which is synchronised with the sound in a strange yet obvious way. The sound crashes into the picture, but this is done subtly, resulting in an interesting tension rather than a sharp interchange (as was the case in Our Songbook by Artur Żmijewski or in the “operatic” series of films by Katarzyna Kozyra). Dudek plays to perfection with the formal scheme of Paweł Mykietyn’s work, who, in turn, interpreted one of Shakespeare’s Sonnets in terms of his own, both synaesthetic and synthetic, art.
The artist – Dudek seems to be saying – joins here a list of other artists, enters into a dialogue, creates another layer in a work that is open, that we respond to, absorb with our senses, but which we also comprehend with our mind. This is another stage of working with culture, more a sublimation than a deconstruction (Żmijewski) or a parody (Kozyra) of it.
Dudek may undoubtedly be counted among the contemporary artists who take up the subject of sound. But Opera Proibita is also, and perhaps primarily, an image. An image which brings to mind the photographs of John Coplans and his vision of the body, or the early works of Ryszard Waśko from the Portret pocięty (A Cut-up Portrait) series (1971).
Opera Proibita by Adam Dudek is a non-narrative, almost static work, or perhaps it could be called subtly mobile; it is also extraordinarily inspiring and enormously suggestive.
Adam Mazur
