Rhythmical Lines

“When he was eighty-five, Waclaw Szpakowski wrote a treatise for a lifetime project that no one had known about. Titled “Rhythmical Lines,” it describes a series of labyrinthine geometrical abstractions, each one produced from a single continuous line.”

“He’d begun these drawings around 1900, when he was just seventeen—what started as sketches he then formalized, compiled, and made ever more intricate over the course of his life.”

“Though the kernels of his ideas came from informal notebooks, the imposing virtuosity and opaqueness of Szpakowski’s final drawings are anything but spontaneous or random. His enigmatic process—how he could draw with such supreme evenhandedness, could make his designs so pristine and yet so intricate—is hinted at only in his few visible erasure marks.”

“These works did not reach an audience until 1978, five years after Szpakowki’s death; today they’re still obscure and easily misunderstood.”

“audiences today may understand the meaning at the heart of Szpakowski’s project better than Rodchenko or Kandinsky ever could. The benefit of seeing art in this post-everything period is that a slew of categories—Abstract? Modernist? Minimalist? Conceptual?—can come together like a poker hand, considered in the palm all at once. When you find out that Szpakowski worked in isolation for three decades, you’re dealt another card: Outsider.”

“But Szpakowski wasn’t at all provincial. A trained architect who worked as an engineer, he played the violin on the side (he later said his drawings could be used as musical scores).”

“His notebooks are like a twentieth-century version of Leonardo da Vinci’s, with enthusiastic scribblings next to observations of architecture and diagrams of natural phenomena, from ocean currents to fir-tree needles.”

“Though this text is aimed at an imaginary future viewer, Szpakowski could never have anticipated the particular tensions of the twenty-first century gaze: our initial suspicion that the designs, for their perfection, must be computer generated; and, upon discovering that they’re not, our fetishizing his hand-drawing technique.”

“Szpakowski took issue, in his lifetime, with the swallowed-whole way of looking that rendered his designs mere decorations, perhaps drawing on older referents like the ancient Greek meander motif or textile patterns. He insists that “a single glance would not be enough,” and that his were in fact “linear ideas,” with “inner content” accessible only to those who follow the line with their eyes on its journey from left to right: a process not unlike reading.”

“the velocity of Szpakowski’s drawings, the way in which, upon entering, you find yourself on a one-way road without median or rest stop, victim to the hair-raising sharpness of his turns.”

“Szpakowski’s systematization and its “inner content”: the ways in which we bind infinity in legibility, dooming any description to a fragment.”

“Sam Lewitt’s works are strikingly close to Szpakowski’s, but only formally. Lewitt’s curving lines reference and function as blown-up models of heating systems used in telecommunication technology. Though both artists are interested in the efficiency of form as it may relate to invisible forces, Lewitt’s work takes a critical distance typical of contemporary work that renders Szpakowski’s inventiveness quaint.”

“perhaps it’s “the ultimate nerdiness of Szpakowski, how in a very isolated way he was insisting that he discovered something no one else ever thought of.” She paused, “It’s not naïve in a negative way. It’s a sense of freedom, and I think that kind of freedom is important for artists to be able to create.””