Bujak, a story of stories. The drama within the form. by Giorgio Agnisola
There are many ways to tell the story of life. One of them is to take emblematic signs of one’s existence, direct or mediated, realistic or symbolic, and represent them as in a diary of the soul: visual scores, memory records, images, traces, intuitions, thoughts; signs of reality reworked in the mind, footprints of often silent paths, in which inspiration overcomes and turns into a form. Such a method might seem spontaneous, provisional, labile, and purely allusive, even risky. In reality, this is precisely where the creative score moves from: from flashing of intuitions and knotting of suggestions that seek an order reflected in the concrete of the work. Hubert Bujak’s work seems to be born from such an approach: an expressive path that has its beginning in that still shapeless phase that constitutes its miraculous prerequisite, visual fragments and annotations, which he then recomposes as in a diary, in which memory and sign meet, become a tale. On closer inspection, the result is a tale that is tense and vigilant, beyond form that is not a simple juxtaposition of themes but an articulated reconfiguration of them: a human and psychological recovery and rearrangement that seems to have meaning for the artist himself. After all, any other form of autobiographical narrative would risk being purely didactic. Bujak is aware of this. When representing himself, he uses small tiles, each with a specific and symbolic theme. He avoids constructing a pure sign language and orders the tiles on the pace of inner memory, in which images converge, which have something archaic and sometimes primitive about them, reflected, however, in a contemporary sensibility, made up of conceptual clues even before metaphorical places. Everything is as if rewritten on a new page, composed of fragments but having value only in the whole. This is witnessed by some works in the exhibition, characterized by contexts carved out with relief marks on tiles that are also raised, sometimes in metal, sometimes made of a poorer material, marking the provisionality, the exemplariness, and perhaps also the fragility, the emotionality of the story, beyond the final composition. The choice of color also makes sense. And here, a distinction needs to be made. The works with bright, intense, uniform, and glossy tones, red and yellow, but also bright blue and green, give back at first glance the feeling of happiness of the gaze, accentuated by the material, aluminum, of which the base of the forms is made, as in the winning work of the COMEL 2023 Award. Happiness that, however, is not directly combined with the prominence of the signs, which instead tell emblematic stories, partly cryptic, and return a dimension of soul suffered and interpreted sometimes with sharp and painful metaphors. From this counterpoint arises in the image a kind of mysterious tension, sometimes dark, sometimes disturbing. Above all, his paintings, chromatically dense and pictorially mellow, recover the form of expressionist graffiti. Above all, the artist testifies to a dramatic essence of his own, made up of warnings, omens, premonitions, and enigmas. In which life is also consumed. Bujak’s art is not just a reflection of his personal journey, but also a mirror to our times. While initially cerebral, his compositions reveal a truth of the soul exposed to the dark signs of our existence in a challenging historical era. Bujak captures these signs with a language bordering on the surreal, infused with spiritual solid tension and dense passion. His work invites us not just to read and understand, but to delve deeper, to explore and live the life of our time.
There are many ways to tell the story of life. One of them is to take emblematic signs of one’s existence, direct or mediated, realistic or symbolic, and represent them as in a diary of the soul: visual scores, memory records, images, traces, intuitions, thoughts; signs of reality reworked in the mind, footprints of often silent paths, in which inspiration overcomes and turns into a form. Such a method might seem spontaneous, provisional, labile, and purely allusive, even risky. In reality, this is precisely where the creative score moves from: from flashing of intuitions and knotting of suggestions that seek an order reflected in the concrete of the work. Hubert Bujak’s work seems to be born from such an approach: an expressive path that has its beginning in that still shapeless phase that constitutes its miraculous prerequisite, visual fragments and annotations, which he then recomposes as in a diary, in which memory and sign meet, become a tale. On closer inspection, the result is a tale that is tense and vigilant, beyond form that is not a simple juxtaposition of themes but an articulated reconfiguration of them: a human and psychological recovery and rearrangement that seems to have meaning for the artist himself. After all, any other form of autobiographical narrative would risk being purely didactic. Bujak is aware of this. When representing himself, he uses small tiles, each with a specific and symbolic theme. He avoids constructing a pure sign language and orders the tiles on the pace of inner memory, in which images converge, which have something archaic and sometimes primitive about them, reflected, however, in a contemporary sensibility, made up of conceptual clues even before metaphorical places. Everything is as if rewritten on a new page, composed of fragments but having value only in the whole. This is witnessed by some works in the exhibition, characterized by contexts carved out with relief marks on tiles that are also raised, sometimes in metal, sometimes made of a poorer material, marking the provisionality, the exemplariness, and perhaps also the fragility, the emotionality of the story, beyond the final composition. The choice of color also makes sense. And here, a distinction needs to be made. The works with bright, intense, uniform, and glossy tones, red and yellow, but also bright blue and green, give back at first glance the feeling of happiness of the gaze, accentuated by the material, aluminum, of which the base of the forms is made, as in the winning work of the COMEL 2023 Award. Happiness that, however, is not directly combined with the prominence of the signs, which instead tell emblematic stories, partly cryptic, and return a dimension of soul suffered and interpreted sometimes with sharp and painful metaphors. From this counterpoint arises in the image a kind of mysterious tension, sometimes dark, sometimes disturbing. Above all, his paintings, chromatically dense and pictorially mellow, recover the form of expressionist graffiti. Above all, the artist testifies to a dramatic essence of his own, made up of warnings, omens, premonitions, and enigmas. In which life is also consumed. Bujak’s art is not just a reflection of his personal journey, but also a mirror to our times. While initially cerebral, his compositions reveal a truth of the soul exposed to the dark signs of our existence in a challenging historical era. Bujak captures these signs with a language bordering on the surreal, infused with spiritual solid tension and dense passion. His work invites us not just to read and understand, but to delve deeper, to explore and live the life of our time.
