ROBERT KOENIG IN THE SHADOW OF THE TREE OF LIFE
All that is past gives an object added meaning. That which is old is authentic and genuine, real, tied to the world from whence it came. That which is from long ago does not lie therefore is pure truth. That which is ancient is primary and elementary, close in time to the beginning in which the golden age of the history of mankind is situated. That which is old in the life of man is elementary and linked to a carefree childhood.
I don’t know when Robert’s interest in ‘that which once was’ surfaced. Without doubt his mother picked him up in her arms – and showed him the old trees. Without doubt, she said: “you are too heavy – I can’t carry you anymore”. She undoubtedly had the power to enchant the world.
I think Robert Koenig inherited the ability and power to enchant the world from her, to bewitch his dreams, converse with the spirits, create disquiet in the roughly hewn wooden figures of his ancestors, which he carries around the world with him. Other people’s stories also stick to him.
Koenig accepted the task of predicting history, the guardian of memory. He talks with the spirits through his sculpture. He bows down over the russet letters with which dozens of names of his ancestors were written down. He works in haste before they turn to dust.
The Holy Grail is one of the most beautiful complex symbols of the world. The loss of the Grail is the loss of an inner link, whether that is a religious link or that of any source of happiness. That is why this loss – the loss of memory is also the loss of this elementary state. Grail at the same time means vessel or book. The search for the Grail is the search for a lost treasure and is contrary to the race of the “Cursed Hunter”.
I don’t know how much Robert knows about the cosmic Tree of Life but I know he is in its shadow.
In paradise there grew the Tree of Life but also the Tree of Good and Evil – or of recognition. The Tree of Life grew in secret. It was not possible to recognise it. Therefore Adam had no access to it until he approached the recognition of good and evil. The Tree of Life can give immortality, but it is not easy to reach. It is hidden like the herb of immortality that Gilgamesh searches for in the depths of the ocean or like the golden apples of the Garden of Hesperydes guarded by monsters. Within the shadows of forgotten ancestors he bows his head before the great Tree of Life.
Prof. Piotr Jargusz, Krakow, 20 June 2005
Looking at the artwork of Robert Koenig I get the feeling of having seen something similar, or at least artwork created in a similar spirit. These reminders result from experiences both personal and those from other creators seeking their own means of expression. They are, often intuitively, acquired layers of historical aspirations used towards the needs of expressing one's own feelings when confronted by nature, the fate of mankind or one's own emotions. As in the case of Koenig this means touching and discovering family events. For the artist inspiration can be found everywhere. It is enough to fire the imagination and to charge it with genuine emotion. The results appear in an unexpected way and surprise even the very creator who in professional and often unavoidably routine activities forgets about the need to constantly test one's sensitivity for the presence of the authentic world untainted by aesthetic calligraphy.
Robert Koenig set in motion his own mechanism for perceiving matters which formed him through the experiences of the century in which many families and human groups gather knowledge about facts and exercise an adaptability to things both magnificent and tragic. Whilst regularly visiting family lands he creates a saga, by now however for universal use, because art always has a scope which goes beyond the enclaves of even the most typical for human fate.
Especially the sculptures figures which seemingly express an indifference to the events which pass by but which in fact bow down over the inevitability of their fate. In this work, whether he wanted to or not, he continues the lament of the Greek chorus in the ancient tragedy. We can never protect our creativity from the dependence on the paralysing knowledge and philosophical indifference locked in ancient art. The consolation is that every creator, consciously or not, feels an irresistible urge to find himself in this honourable march towards wisdom and beauty.
prof. Wl. Kunz, Krakow 21.9.2001
The first non-iconic representation of Aphrodite in her sanctuary in Paphos, Cyprus has the shape of a conical unworked stone while the holy temple perimeter is surrounded by a cyclopean stone wall. In these same prehistoric times the early Slavs doubtless worshipped oaks, in order to carve their gods in warm and living timber. Thus, already thousands of years ago two spheres of culture were outlined: the sphere of stone and the sphere of wood. Distinguished and monumental in its unchanging duration, also intimate. Both in its deepest expression, as well as treatment, in which according to the feedback principle effect influences cause. Because can one compare a sharp, human skin injuring stone chip with a soft wood smelling of the forest?
Robert Koenig belongs to the culture of wood. More so, he belongs to its specific circle in which it survived in an untainted form to the present day. To the circle of the culture of mountain dwelling people, with shepherd like traditions. And these teach a co-existence with nature and identify with it in a way which is comparably stronger and more exact than that of inhabitants of large and not so large towns.
Saint Augustine, the bishop of Hippona, philosopher and theologian of the late antiquity acknowledged rhythm as the basic notion of the whole of aesthetics. And moreover, saw in it the source of all beauty. In order to do this he broadened this concept so that it would take in not only audible rhythm, but also visible rhythm. And not only the rhythm of physical bodies but also the rhythm of the soul. In people, nature, experiences and actions.
Today after fifteen hundred years more and more often we admit that he is right. It happens like this though with the changes of our views about time, perceived more often not in its linear, but in its cyclical dimension, understood as a series of occurences that follow one another in a specified order and repeating itself periodically. Like years, seasons and generations, Robert Koenig repeats his carved figures and arranges them in rhythmic sequences creating from them compositions with an almost sacred dignity. Rhythm as aesthetics and rhythm as a visible group of logical cycles comes together in his art into one coherent whole into one harmony of the world. Koenig talks about himself and his feelings, knowing surely that every work of art must have a personal dimension in order for it to aspire to a universal one. And more the fact that the most universal works originated as the most personal, as a reflection of very intimate and considered emotions.
Todays world is stepping away from the McLuhan ideals of a "global village" . It discards recent dreams of a unified world in respect of both artistic inspirations and aims. National and even local distinctions are resurfacing and manifest their presence more strongly, doubtless in a perverse way but also as the impulse of healthy self-defense: people don't want to become anonimous numbers on a computerised list of the United Republics of the Earth. They want to retain their seperateness and singular individuality. They don't want to be citizens of the world hurled around without rhyme or reason anymore as was the case until quite recently. Quite the opposite even: they desire to be rooted like trees in their one and only place on earth, or if fate uprooted them from there to return, like the mythical Anteus in order to regain strength for further battles, or maybe even just to have an ordinary life? And to feel ones worth, no doubt, " because so what as the poet said if the whole world falls on its knees before me, if in my own family village nobody has heard of me?"
Robert Koenig's mother came from the village of Dominikowice in South East Poland. His uncle was a sculptor, educated in the famous Kenar school in Zakopane in the Tatra Mountains, and also a musician. Koenig is similar to him like the pupils of the Zakopane school he also blunts his tools in order to gain greater expression from the sharpely cut wood. For doubtless atavistic reasons unknown to him, he likes to repeat the same motif, as does our very own rosary, which through repetition inclines towards meditation and the delving into mysteries.
Mysticism? Maybe. Definitely mystery, but isn't art one big mystery, one big obsession and attempt to reach the not wholly conscious layers of our personality.
For that reason the art of Robert Koenig is close to us, because are we not also looking for an answer to a similar and age-long question troubling artists from the dawn of art, such as Gauguin, looking for the key in the painting "Where do we come from, where are we, where are we going?" Exactly.
Jerzy Madeyski, Krakow, 1997
Robert Koenig's is a unique voice in British Sculpture, indeed it is doubtful that his work can properly be said to be British. It is European Sculpture, not as a transnational and indistinct idea of the modern world, but the product of a specific region and time, speaking through history.
Koenig is part of a tradition that is resurfacing after a time of near invisibility. The work that he was making ten years ago in retrospect looks curiously prescient. He drew from a culture of carving that was rooted in the folk art of Central Europe;
a naturalist depiction of the world with mythic overtones. Translated into the language of the modern world the work took on a peculiarly complex role. With the end of the modern period, the abandoning of progress and the catastrophic collapse of European ideology, there emerges into the light a world long suppressed, thought to have been dead and to have been buried beneath the onward rush of history. It is a world that is fearful and confused. A world of longing for identity; beneath the cry of competing nationalisms is the idea of a people, of the community, not as a liberal model of virtue but as the bond of identity and an expression of belonging. Powerful ties of blood and the land reassert themselves but now in the guise of the present. At its extreme is the turmoil and bitter retribution at the edge of Europe but elsewhere it is the sullen expression of a confused longing for certainty. It is all the more fearful in that it happens in a world that we recognise; the banal world of the everyday. The ordinary and familiar are disturbed, as though, walking across a field of snow, we come across a crack through which we see water below slow and turbid. Walking on, the land is not the same. So it is in Europe today. There is the insiduous realisation that everything is changed.
To speak of this change is to acknowledge history. A history bound up with myth, with the ancient voices of attachment to the land, of a place and of a people. The siren songs that drew whole continents to war and barbarism; that shaped our lives. Myths that have long been consigned to textbooks as the archaic remnant of a world long past.
It is no coincidence that the small renaissance of wood carving apparent in Europe should have happened in Germany; in our century the focus of the long struggle of nationalism and mystery. It was given impetus and found acceptance through the painted wood sculpture of Georg Baselitz. In the line of Kirschner's expressionist figures the wood is scarred and the heads, excessive and gestural, have pigment dragged across them. They are the heads of idols, of ancestors. They came out of the expressionist tradition but made space effectively for other artists to be seen.
It is against this background that Robert Koenig works. Previously the respectable inheritance of folk art as wood sculpture lay in large part through Brancusi and the relation of the modern to tradition that he described. In retrospect it can be seen that Koenig's work in the early 1980's prefigured a very different pattern. Taking the material and manner of folk carving in central Europe he also took a sense of inheritance; but he places it in a world that is no longer modern. He recognised that the relationship of history, tradition and myth was a profoundly complex one having the very greatest significance for the present. Whilst he could not have predicted the social and political upheaval that has since seized Europe, he obsessively addressed these questions; how can we understand history as being one with ourselves? How are the deep and irrational longings of human beings to be understood in a society that has consigned those instincts to the past? How does myth shape us? Far from being a marginal artist working in an alien tradition Koenig should be seen as working through ideas that are quite central to an understanding of Europe today.
Even in his most decorative work he follows a tradition that combines craft and art in the exploration of cultural inheritance. In the repeated pattern of leaves for example, the leaves are of wood, the repeated motif is pattern-making, but pattern-making which just as in its apparent model each leaf is necessarily different. Of course it is not a tree or group of leaves but the representation of a familiar depiction of a tree in folk art. It is shown in the community alongside similar representations: the highly mediated graphic symbols of commercial logos.
Significantly Koenig also uses classical models carved in wood; the sophisticated signs of "high" culture and mythology in the medium and manner of traditional and debased "low" culture. Excoriating the false break; high and low.
But most important of all are the single figures that inhabit this landscape. Frequently isolated, sometimes carved at speed, sketched in, sometimes in naturalistic detail, they inhabit the space of the world. Quite ordinary they disrupt the smooth skin of the familiar. These people are so intensely felt, though still, often inward looking and self contained; they fill us with disquiet. Around them is the depiction of the cultural world in the patterns of myth and of history, and the complex interaction of the present with the past. But in their presence there is the loss and anguish of the desperate dilemma, focused in our recognition of another human being who is at once seperated from and within history, the dilemma that we share. It is the great and undeniable strength of Koenig's work that from the most simple gestures, he most seemingly naive articulaton, he describes a figure of pathos.
Koenig's works are shown in public and private spaces that constantly recuperate their meaning. By the chance of the market, almost inadvertently, the social implication of Koenig's work, that is; the speaking of an everyday life permeated by history and myth; is reinforced in the way it is shown and the space it inhabits. In parks and pedestrian malls, in hospitals, gardens, and houses, this social implication is subsumed into the commerce of the everyday. This is the communal space of which he speaks.
It is time that Koenig's work was reexamined in its true place. Seen in the context of Europe today; the place in which we live; the context of the struggle of identity and the community; of myth and of history.
Craigie Horsfield, 29 May 1992