“Landscape, not forgotten”, is as much the evocative title of this joint exhibition by Jarek Wojcik and Przemys³aw Cerebie¿-Tarabicki, as it is a truism; Wojcik and Cerebie¿-Tarabicki, both born in Szczecin, Poland, having experienced a similar childhood environment, and having shared similar visual memories, recall the landscape of their youth, albeit from totally different, literal perspectives.

A resident of Australia for the past 20 years,Wojcik’s creative reimagining of place and experience traverses continents; the work of Cerebie¿-Tarabicki is a reflection of his immediate environment. And yet ironically, this ‘tryanny of distance’ so endemic to Australian-based artists, is the very concept which links both Wojcik and Cerebie¿-Tarabicki; inherent to both artists’ work is something of ‘a journey of the mind’, memories of a past, articulation of familiar sights, sounds, colours and scents, all redolent of the landscape of their conjoined youth. As Wojcik has stated:

“Art is a journey, and for me every work is the beginning of that journey. I’m visiting places which are not necessarily actual locations or even physical sites. They can be places within one’s self. This is a mental landscape, part of my response to what is around me through the study of history. Every object, every destination initiates a process of conversation with reality and produces a fascinating collection of stories, messages and experiences. Similarly, multi-layered narratives inhabit their respective paintings. The creative processes of each artist, pave the way for a particularly poetic approach to painting. In some respects therefore such an artistic collaboration was inevitable perhaps, for these two artists, with so much in common.

But there do exist differences: interestingly, the iconography of Cerebie¿-Tarabicki denotes an especially personal note: the stylized face, derivative of a self-portrait and which permeates many of his works, acts as both a compositional anchor and a ‘gesticulation’. By inserting oneself into a work, the ‘face of the artist’ or the ‘artist’s intention’ becomes so much more present. Wojcik is more reserved: his iconography resides in less animate objects such as the proliferation of musical instruments, harnessed by a wry wit.