VS is an acronym for the confrontation of two worlds of graphic design, which are not normally described as absolutely contrastive. Rather, there is some parallelism, or even symmetry between them. The symmetry of talent and parallelism of innovativeness cause these two worlds, individual and different as they may be, to eventually gravitate towards one another, crossing paths at some point.

Actual Art Zone will become the point of crossing these paths that lead the development of the most talented graphic designers of the young generation. Zona will become a space of confrontation and competition, but also a space of meeting. Two parallel worlds will therefore come close to each other with some risk of a collision. A confrontation of the two most creative and original projects must lead to a clash. But the clash will at the same time be an unusual collision in Polish graphic design.

VS is, in this case, a duel between two masters: a master of typography and a master of pictography. One can say that the difference between those two -graphies is what makes the two worlds which are about to meet original and different. The meeting is partially driven by an external force of the exposition, but there seems to be an internal force that attracts them too – shared fascination for the Polish functional printing tradition, created by Władysław Strzemiński.

For Ryszard Bienert, typography is a tool which allows him to subtly alter the meaning, make the text metaphorical, or sometimes even to abstract the meaning. He designs sets of fonts, special characters and graphical symbols to create complex systems where text becomes an autonomous composition. Sometimes the systems, like in functional printing, reflect the structure of the text in their shape. Other times, their autonomy pushes it so far it borders on illegibility. Jacques Derrida famously said, ‘there is no outside-the-text’. Bienert would add a new tongue-in-cheek meaning to that phrase. For him, experiencing reality becomes a text, but it is a text which is hidden as cryptograms arranged in a way that promises an unlimited range of meanings.

Hakobo (Jakub Stępień) possesses an incredible ability to see the meanings of words as images which he uses to create graphic symbols. He has created a whole universe of pictograms which are his system of reading and writing down his experience of reality. This pictographic writing uses mostly the power of ellipsis and condensing many meanings in one picture which has an incredible property of generalising. For this reason, many of his projects are somewhere on the borderline of design and visual arts. The iconic abundance adds to them the metaphorical potential unleashing uncontrollable meanings.

While Bienert achieves an explosion of text in typographic systems, Hakobo implodes it into pictograms. Both artists generate immense forces. A joint exposition may cause an explosion. An explosion of creativity.

curator: Kamil Kuskowski, cooperation: Jarosław Lubiak

Actual Art Zona / Zona Sztuki Aktualnej
Tymienieckiego 3, Łódź
www.zona-art.pl