Nocny Art Patrol: Dawid Czycz - The United States of Happiness

Dawid Czycz - The United States of Happiness

curator: Paweł Witkowski
Mazowieckie Centrum Sztuki Współczesnej Elektrownia, Radom

exhibition 10.02.-12.03.2023

The sum of our desires and Liza Minnelli’s Leg, or The United States of Dawid Czycz

Agnieszka Gołębiewska

What good is sitting alone in your room?
Come hear the music play.
Life is a Cabaret, old chum,
Come to the Cabaret.
(Cabaret song)

But it's fun all around!
Can you eat blood steaks with a gold tooth?
Not enough hands to play all these tunes anymore.

On the horizon, like a frozen frame from a spaghetti western projected on the sky, a red glow, or rather a pennant with a cowboy pierced by an arrow. All old forms vanish, tough cowboys fall off their horses. Before new niceties crystallise, the world spins and runs wild. And it's all because of those killer legs of Liza Minnelli: she cancan dances from backstage and fires a shotgun. Her kick makes all the good and at the same time the curses of this world flow in a golden stream. The carnival is in progress, no matter who is partying or how. It could be a reception at an embassy or a dawn fight for sales in front of a construction market. When did this world become this marketplace? Has it always been one? When did it become a quest for perpetual entertainment?

Hands, hands everywhere. Reaching out for everything at once. All the netflixes of the world. Not one episode anymore, but the whole season until the morning. On a hand x-rayed, a smiling golden watch measures time for us. The landscape appears like a lightning-electric, illuminated 24 hours a day funfair hall. Are these palm trees from an overseas trip, or rather plastic decorations surrounding used-car parking lots known from American movies? Whatever.

A well-known financier, may he remain anonymous, mentions in passing that if this picture were to read like a stock market chart, no Dow Jones would stand it. Well, maybe China's Tiger indices. Or rather, cryptocurrency indices. Because "The United States of Happiness" by David Czycz is a painting of incredible pulsating power. The sum of all our desires, insatiable appetites, instagram avatars of our being, dreams, cunning and greed. It is like the narcotic vision of a sales executive. English subtitles can already be understood by a child in the cradle. So let us shout: "More and more!" Umbrella drinks will not taste good every day, but they look so pretty in the IG stories. It doesn't matter that they are from two years ago, let them watch!

Apart from the smoke, cheerful black-faced sperms are flying out of the bifurcated gun. Sperms, or maybe viruses, as we know it is possible. They cover everything slowly like volcanic dust to change our world once and for all. Only the hand of the drowning man extends from the depths, and the cuffed arm points downwards. “Oh no!” We won't know if the hard candy looking sun is about to set, or if it is rising over that horizon of tangled human affairs. In digital, increasingly present worlds, this is irrelevant, a day can last for ages. Here it's supposed to be pleasant and painless, like in furry handcuffs.

The narration of Dawid Czycz's paintings seems to follow paths known only to him. These are stories built on many levels, on several planes simultaneously, taking place in different times. Since Neo Rauch, or rather since Jörg Immendorff's German Neue Wilde, and in fact since Bosch's paradises and Bruegel's Dutch proverbs, such pictures draw us in like an incredible cinema, woven from human stories. Once it's funny, once it's scary. We repeatedly nod, clutch our heads, laugh. We are amazed, awed. Fascinated.

The artist combines realism with incredibly engaging abstract parts, with surrealism and pop art, creating a true conglomerate of methods and meanings. Very clear are also here inspirations from the mass culture and the world of advertising, as well as the influence of the American culture, which we have been and still are unconsciously eating up with a spoon, sometimes we laugh at it, like at the seriousness of David Hasselhoff from Baywatch. The paintings of David Czycz are like the best cartoons mixed with Hollywood cinema, they can be consumed over and over again because each time they delight and surprise us anew.

Dawid Czycz catches us by the hand, even when we don't see it. He shows our hidden desires, sometimes surprisingly shallow. Our associations, our ways of thinking. The artist talks about our times: turmoil, chaos and fears. About fears, both real and virtually driven; about personal emotions and those experienced collectively, though most often alone with an iPhone, not in the company of other people. About the habit of living in relative prosperity, or aspiring to be on constant last minute vacations. And about the sum of our sins. For Dawid Czycz weaves stories about our never-ending consumption, about these artificially created appetites and about the addiction to these learned, new tastes. Apparently this is how the synthetic flavors of fast food affect our brain: they are disgusting and wonderful at the same time. They provide such a multi-level sensation that the brain is flooded with a wave of "More and more!". Finally, fast food can also be our very lives, our shallow relationships, or our superficial treatment of important matters. After all, can an overlay on a social media profile picture be evidence of commitment to an idea?

It is worth noting that the painting "The United States of Happiness" was created in early 2020, a moment before the outbreak of the pandemic. Like a prophecy, or a warning, and certainly as evidence of extraordinary artistic intuition. This painting is like a reset, displaying our aftershock. What do you mean! Is this the end of partying, buying and flying? Will this spiral wind up again? Probably. Like in the movie "Cabaret" about the early 1930s, where everything was boiling and swirling like in an overflowing champagne glass: losing oneself in fun, fear, looking for those responsible for the chaos, a sense of the end, the birth of new, sometimes murderous orders.

We all know that life can't be constant entertainment. Because Liza Minnelli, too, eventually emerges tired from backstage after a cabaret night. Stage makeup needs to be washed off, teeth brushed, and the workers get up. Even if for remote work.