Roman CIESLEWICZ

Throughout its professional life, Roman Cieslewicz showed an exceptional inventiveness. With an untameable creative energy and without being concerned with borders, it used joining and the photomontage to divert images and to create strange associations. The quasi systematic use of the colors sharp and the pure forms gives to its creations a single and immediately recognizable seal. Beyond its artistic qualities, Roman Cieslewicz remains also unforgettable for its standpoint, its claims, its engagement but also its capacity to be shocked. Biography of the author Born in 1930 in Poland, Roman Cieslewicz passed most of its life to France. Its work, completely singular definitively upset contemporary graphic creation. Funny, provocative, sometimes even uncomfortable or dérangeantes, its image cannot leave us indifferent. Disappeared in 1996, Roman Cieslewicz is without any doubt a emblematic figure of contemporary graphics. IT HUSTLES all the rules. It stirs up the spirits. ll triturates the images with the scissors, the photocopier and the adhesive to recycle them in a strange, provocative and poetic way. It diverts reality, recomposes it to create an inventive, free, coloured and black world at the same time, passing very close to the unreal one sometimes. The French artist of Polish extraction, Romance Cieslewicz (born in 1930 in Lwow, died in 1996 in Paris), that which was defined as a “pointsman of retina” to have the eye and the world with the eye, left us the explosive work among richest, most expressive, most claiming of the school of the Polish poster artists; this school born in the crucible of propaganda after the Second World war. Its style, founded on the circle, the large obliques, exaggerated off-centrings, the use of the letter for its figurative value, is recognized in the moment. The artist unceasingly nourishes associations of images in black and white (800/1 200 € for Topor, a photocollage of 1978, 2.000/3 000 €, joining original for It of 1968 with its bodies of truncated women, in fishnet stocking) but also colors sharp (2 000/4 000 € for the image icon of Che If, original model for the cover Opus n° 3). The world of Cieslewicz touches us by the expression of turbulences of its heart, its humour and its phantasms. Poetic and extremely at the same time. Always full with modernity.