Of all the young painters whose evolution I have been able to follow New York during the last years of the war, Gerome Kamrowski is the one who has impressed me by far the most by reason of the quality and sustained character of his research. Among all the newcomers there, he was the only one I found tunneling in a new direction, with a praiseworthy disdain for the gallery whether it should appertain to painting or a mine. So many artists nowadays are trying to strike it rich, when the vein is in fact exhausted, that most exhibitions look rather like ghost towns that have been abandoned in the wake of an abortive gold rush and which no decorative efforts can possibly succeed in reviving. So much the worse for those who persist scrabbling among lodes which have been thoroughly worked already by the century’s great discovers – Picasso, Chirico, Duchamp, Kandinsky, Mondrian, Ernst, Miro. All that the latter have bequeathed to Kamrowski is their pickaxe and lamp.

It is the nature of this spiritual gold to appear only where it has never been previously located, and it is said that one can only find it by recognizing it as “a mirror of the world of archetypes, the source of light and forms.” 1 Kamrowski’s ambitions enterprise is to establish the cosmology of man’s inner worlds, which can be undertaken, of course, by having constant recourse to the observation of the movements of the stars. This approach, in the field of art, is at present the only one which is in harmony with that of modern biologists, according to whom man remains in direct contact with the nature not only by means of his organs of perception but also through the agency of visceral rhythms, “the outcropping of visceral feeling in peripheral consciousness [translating itself] into mental forms, and thus into images.” 2 There can be no question, then, about the value of a systematic exploration of the world of these images in the sense that Kamrowski has conducted it.

The method that I have seen him use for this purpose has always seems to me perfectly appropriate and rich in possibilities. It involves the initial preparation and elaboration of a length of pack cloth large enough to contain and display for us in a single panoramic view not only the relevant examples of the differnart kingdoms of nature, but also objects deriving from the history of man (his monuments, utensils, working tools, weapons, works of art). 3 A veritable connective tissue, between elements considered hitherto to be completely disparate, has only to be brought into being and transcending the limits of “structural thought”. He has constructed a thread with the aim of stretching it to the farthest point of the physical world and then testing the world’s resistance to it before leading it back again towards the mental world, in order to take its mysterious workings by surprise. Here again, the biological datum is of the greatest importance. If, in the living substance, it is the peripheral elements (hard and clearly differentiated) which assure the body’s architectural stability, it must not be forgotten that it is the kernel (of a colloidal nature) which supervises the maintenance of life. Kamrowski has been entirely concerned with the functions of absorption and liberation of energy which largely determine bodily structures. And, unlike those that limit themselves with the rind of these structures, Kamrowski allows us to be present at their formation.

In this world of pure prehension and interception, the lights and forms obtained offer an organic character which guarantees absolutely the harmony of their relationships. The most secret life passes in front of us here, and is at least as generous as that other life in lavishing all sorts of charms.

 

1 O V de Milosz: Cantique de la connnaissance.

2 Pierre Mabille: Initiation a la connaissance de l’Homme

3 G Kamrowski’s “panoramagraphs” in VVV, New York, March 1943