TRIP FOLK; or enteogens in the service of urban folklore | Sławek Shuty

Artist

Sławek Shuty

ABOUT EXHIBITION

opening on November 21, 2014 at 6:00 p.m

Apparently, the village no longer exists. At least in the dimension of artistic production of authentic folk art that is an expression of reality, which we are watching today in ethnographic museums and museums. This does not change the sociology data saying that 3/4 of our society is a village that has settled in the city. This fact, which is the subject of repression, makes one ask the question whether, with the change of lifestyle, one can try to fantasize about folk art practiced in urban conditions?
Slawomir Shuty, playing the role of an eccentric researcher, seeks such moments based on psychedelia manifesting itself in artistic forms. In our imagination, it belongs to the space of a modern city, to the experience of bohemian artistic culture. Shuty tries to reverse this thinking, to examine the similarity of folk art and modernist exhilaration. Trip Folk is a journey taking place in the direction of the experience of expanded awareness as the state of the original bewilderment related to the closeness of nature. The artist’s psychedelic character became, in the artist’s opinion, one of the foundations for folk art. Preserved in the form of abstract ornaments, patterns and geometric motifs, it permeates the world of rural imagination. In this perspective, it appears not as a naive expression but a symbol of a specific initiation, a mystical code, because this form of psychedelia was deeply penetrated by the spiritual element. Forms of mandalas, duplicated patterns that grow into complex structures are understood here as a record of hallucinogenic visions. A series of abstract paintings created by gesture is like a journey to the source, a regression undertaken to understand the libidinal energy that permeates modern cities.
During the work on the exhibition, Shuty was exposed to psychoactive drugs. Their influence was a factor to restore the original experience of deeper perception, constantly sought after by all artistic strategies. The ethnogens of our social origin are not so much extinct as the lifestyle changes, which in the new conditions need a specific activation.
Trip Folk is a continuation of the artist’s interests initiated as part of the Urban Folk Art project, when he explored the possibilities of combining a street art art language with the way of expressing naive artists. It is also a test of contemporary urban folklore, in some sense formally naive, but hiding a visual story about the myth of reuniting with nature. Shutego’s project also fits into the process of eroding the difference between what is artistic and what is ethnographic, what has been found in the field of anthropological research and what is involved in the history of art.

Sławomir Shuty – naive and intermedia artist, novelist prose writer awarded Polityka Passport, film director, co-creator of animation. His artistic quest leads, among others, through Baton art, templates and graphic novels. As a creative material, it uses the observed phenomena of reality and its images captured first by other media. Together with Daniel Rycharski, he created the Duet introducing modern themes of contemporary folklore within the art collective.