If architecture is the first art, the major art of designing and constructing spaces, it forms the matrix of Chazme’s pictorial research, a formal abstraction inspired by urban geometries and nuanced by a singular chromaticity that opens up a metaphorical perspective. The formal universe unfolding as a web of buildings represents what man encounters in postmodern contemporary life? Are they the internal labyrinths into which our dreams lead us? Are these artifacts meant to connect us or separate us, isolating us in wall-based segregations? Chazme’s work opens up endless questions, both intimate and societal.
A pictorial statement inspired by architecture
An urban architect graduated from the Warsaw University of Technology, Chazme has always considered the topology of cities as a prism for approaching the complexity of the human relationship with the world, its often paradoxical way of inhabiting it. The starting point of his pictorial research is often the architecture of urban ensembles that he observes during his urban wanderings, but rather than the form, what he seeks to transcribe in his abstract compositions is the feeling that the built environment can evoke: anxiety, oppression, but also the kinetic energy of flows. Anxiety is a journey without a place, wrote Levinas, and this question for each of us is to find our place, both symbolically and in the figures of reality, summoning at once the most intimate individuality and the forms of social connection that architectures contribute to drawing through dynamics that sometimes associate and sometimes separate. The walls appear as boundaries, bounded zones; the complex compositions make one fear of going astray; yet the works of Chazme, whether monumental frescoes in situ or canvases, seem to reintroduce into this vertical brutality a poetry in chromatic nuances, a part of dream, unexpected horizons and perspectives, or to suggest a critical look at postmodern excesses and their alienating and dehumanizing effects.
Colorimetry as a language
Chazme’s unique chromatic universes open up the possibility of a narrative, a subjective projection that reminds us that the human being cannot be reduced to a functional dimension; it is an object confronted with these formal devices that invade us. It is these questions, these experiences of the Man-in-the-world, these emotions experienced that Chazme seeks to capture in his creative drive. The colorimetry of abstraction undoubtedly expresses what words fail to say when they seek to capture the diffuse and unfathomable sensations that pass through us when spaces seem to conform to our existence.
An adolescence between two worlds and the first pictorial experiments
Painting quickly became the preferred means of expression for Chazme. His first artistic experiments began at the age of 12. It was also a way to assert his own voice alongside a classical musician father who was keen to introduce him to the language of notes. Chazme’s palette of forms and colors would be a palette of shapes and colors. Childhood and adolescence took place in a constant alternation between Switzerland, where he was born, and Poland, where he lived in part. In the 80s and 90s, two visions of the world opposed each other, with extremely contrasting relationships to space. How to move from one to the other, what nuances to discern between two archetypal figures? These are just some of the underground influences that undoubtedly fed the artist’s emerging reflections.
The mural realizations in situ: an architectural abstraction
Chazme is interested in graffiti, at a time when it was booming and already well established in Switzerland, while it was just starting to take off in Poland with the freedom of artistic expression to be conquered. He began working most often in duo with the artist Sepe, combining their artistic approaches: Chazme’s architectural universe and Sepe’s characters for urban scenes between abstraction and figuration that take place on the walls of large cities. In his early work, Chazme was interested in portraits and the figurative, before affirming his orientation towards abstraction. Today, for his mural paintings, he takes as a framework the structure of the building in order to integrate the forms of his compositions into it, so that the result blends with the environment and is presented to a new gaze. Chazme has established himself on the global urban scene, being sought after by institutions for in situ projects or invited to participate in urban art and architecture festivals. One can admire his work on the walls of Warsaw, Lodz, Gdansk, or even in Italy (Fondi, Assago, Formia), Budapest, Washington, Richmond, Taiwan, and recognize his unique universe of vertical geometries and dreamlike colors.
The wall and the canvas: two parallel practices
At the beginning of his practice, the two mediums of expression—the wall and the canvas—are differentiated in Chazme’s approach as two autonomous creative entities. The way of working, the relationship to time, are not the same. It is only with the advancement of his pictorial research that the two practices were able to come together and mutually nourish each other in Chazme’s work. The mural projects are indeed prepared in advance, but the artist always leaves room for improvisation in situ, because his approach aims to place the realization within the existing architectural perspective so that his contribution appears as an extension of the geometry of the built and as an opening to another possible horizon, carried by the atmosphere emanating from the color. In the studio, the possibility of experimenting with techniques, deploying new formal universes and new chromatic sensations without time constraints fuels the development of the work and its new directions.
HAZE, 2022
Acrylic on canvas
Unique work, signed
H70 x L70 cm
IT’S COLD OUTSIDE, 2022
Acrylic on canvas
Unique work, signed
H70 x L70 cm
The work on color, essential and gaining in amplitude.
The color palette has grown over time through research. Initially limited, with a preference for muted effects, for compositions that emanated a sense of tranquility, color is now more diverse and contrasted, to capture the dynamics of urban landscapes, the dynamics of flows, and the constant noise. The artist now employs a full range of colors depending on the subjects he addresses in his works, based on the reflections that inspire him. The colorimetric research becomes a central element when Chazme explores the sensations derived from the interior when confronted with the organization of space. The city, urban design, and architecture crystallize all the subjects that impact on Man in the process of civilizational change. Thus, the richness and amplitude of colors provide a perpetual questioning of what is at play in the shadows of the buildings concentrated in the city.
LIVE MUSIC, 2022
Acrylic on canvas
Unique work, signed
H80 x L60 cm
Architectural references
From his studies in architecture, Chazme developed a particular and valuable interest in the Danish urbanist Jan Gehl, who was concerned with preserving the human scale of walking and strolling in the design of cities, favouring life between lines, encounter rather than circulation and agglomeration. Shaping the city to allow it to reconnect with its democratic scope as a «polis» and not to build according to a technical and functional approach. Chazme appreciates the architect Tadao Ando for his designs that are open to natural elements, where concrete does not rhyme with oppression. Jean Nouvel for his purist forms, Walter Gropius and the Bauhaus, Mies Van Der Rohe and Brutalism, Alvar Aalto and functionalism, or the more recent orientations of deconstructivism in architecture are all landmarks and references that animate his work. Sometimes, specific buildings by their style or iconic character of a particular era appear in Chazme’s canvas compositions, like an architectural quote, when this allows for the pictorial message inherent in the work to be supported.
MAGIC HOUR, 2022
Acrylic on canvas
Unique work, signed
H70 x L70 cm
INERTIA, 2022
Acrylic on canvas
Unique work, signed
H70 x L70 cm
The works by Chazme to be discovered during the group show Projections
For the exhibition Projections presented by Hatchikian Gallery and the art production house Quai 36 during the first quarter of 2023, Chazme created works that take up several aspects of his work, drawn from different techniques and materials, and that evoke different chromatic ranges, in order to address a plurality of subjects and allow viewers to appreciate the full scope of his aesthetic research. Naturally, Chazme’s interest in urban topology leads him to explore the dimension of relief and to open his research to sculpture, an evolution that seems indeed to be in line with his architectural prism and that extends the quest for abstraction of a multitude of possible volumes.
The ultra-modern solitude of the postmodern urban man appears as the flip side of the design of spatial-temporal concentrations in Chazme’s compositions, yet not as a fatality: art is that which is elusive and resists the objectification of man in formal, functional devices, which reintroduces through a visual and chromatic language a poetics of complex existential nuances, a symbolic narrative that traverses the walls to reveal that the essential lies beyond, in the perspectives and their interstices.
