This cycle of oil pastels is a peculiar form of a diary. Years ago, at the beginning of the nineties, I went to a film festival of Andrei Tarkovsky's movies. I always admired his work, considering it more to be poetic painting than movies. It was a whole week of his films: day after day his work was radiating at me. After that I had a very vivid dream period. Every morning balancing on that border between the dream and waking states I would see Rembrandt paintings... his self-portraits and in particular, a laughing old man as if from the story of “Zeuxis”*. This face would come to me in the morning and entire compositions were pouring from it... abstract, yet with tangible imagery flickering in them. It stays in me, that laugh of Rembrandt, a laugh that does not mock Robert Rauschenberg, Hans Hofmann...or Ad Reinhardt.

In 2004 I had another period of dreams...while living high in the mountains of Ardeche, France, a place that I love... I started to make a visual diary, capturing dreams: not their story line... but rather that state of potentiality... that fragrance when you are waking and your dream for a second , as if cigarette smoke, takes on some clear shape and then slowly wanders into thin air... that taste, which you know will go away in no time... that is my subject... and nothing more... that “I Am-ness” - the pure sense of being.

The images that you want to keep, a taste of something that you like... the volume is decreasing... you still remember some logic of your dream... but even this is going away. I am saying “wake up”, but this is also a dream, that “stuff” you call Reality, as dreamy as "A Poet" of Herman Hesse or "One Hundred Years of Solitude" by García Márquez. And in that dream, sometimes like the scene in the movie directed by Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet – "Delicatessen", Dominique Pinon is appearing to blow soap bubbles...for himself or Marie-Laure Dougnac and you can watch it like Circus du Soleil. This is my subject... and nothing more...that sense of transience on the background of “Black Matter”...that which you can't see, because you are that. You can't forget something that you never have to remember, because you are here always and there is no need, nor even the possibility of remembering that you are; there is no memory in that “now”. This is exactly why we don't notice it, because you can't know eternity; you are it.

So what are you searching for constantly? “I Can't Get No Satisfaction”...but of course Mike Jagger got it by now. On any kind of “path”, do you remember the words of e.e. cummings “Seeker of truth / follow no path / all paths lead where / truth is here.” ? Reality as a dream is still reality, something understood by aboriginal people. “Physiology of Dreams” comes from that space and this understanding, it flows like music of Toumani Diabaté, or Tomasz Stańko in “Soul of Things” or “Lontano”. I see that space... I Am That and for a moment this is its expression. It comes as it wants... it moves around...you see a glimpse and it is something, but could as well be something else. No definition, no grasping – let it be. I am walking on that borderline between what's real and unreal, on that thin line. There is nothing more to it, even that line is a dream.

adam rupniewski

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©Adam Rupniewski, 2008.