Crossing antitheses - " What visions in the darkness of light ! " - Samuel Beckett, Company​

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One enters Szajner's work through darkness; it is the theater, the stage for a confrontation, between Phoebus and the Moon, because here light and shadow have an appointment to keep. Resolutely contemporary, his work resists the classic categories of 'sculpture' and 'painting', leaning more towards what one might term 'installations', a word which the artist nonetheless finds inapt to describe his work, preferring " materializations ", as closer to the act of creation itself.

Integrating sound as a " supplementary color ", Bernard Szajner, at once a visual artist and musical composer, transforms sound into its own plastic material, giving it depth and a fierce and profound material consistency which develops the perceived space, causing it to ring out, hesitate and evolve in mid-air. Occupying a space, like sculpture ; often asking to be regarded head-on, like a painting ; spreading itself across a space, which envelops the spectator, inviting them to traverse the work like an installation; this work surpasses genres, forever breaking through like a shaft of light in a darkened frame.

An optical apparatus reminiscent of the camera oscura, the original and sainted stage of western pictorial representation to which Szajner ceaselessly revisits and reinvents. If works such as Ran [Chaos, Lack of Order], explicitly demand a framework which exists in space and physically limits the artwork, keeping the spectator at the edges, Data Forest, a rain of light on mobile beams suspended from the ceiling invites one to enter into the space of the work itself, to become a part of it, to be traversed themselves by this curtain of light or - like a clinamen wishing to recreate the world - the colored light falls in a cascade of atoms which rather than accumulating, fades into a multitude of visual signals where the spectator's regard and body are lost. Blue and orange, evoking the lights of a city at night are the colors of this labyrinth of tangible data, at once visual and sonic.
A city of a multitude of visual solicitations where the visitor is invited to make their way through a magma of signals that somehow never manages to become actual signs. A shadowy forest which implies a straight path which has been lost, that of a world which Szajner believes has lost its way and of an impression of the world disappearing into its multiple, blinding and phenomenal reflections.
A forest therefore not of symbols but of " data ", simple visual signals incapable of making sense. In one of his yet-to-be accomplished pieces, a gust of air travels down a darkened corridor, seeking to haphazardly touch the spectator walking there like a gust of wind. What better way to stage the violation of personal space which our civilization imposes upon the individual.
From seeing to hearing to the tactile, the piece calls upon multiple senses. If one can say that the phrase uttered by the resurrected Christ to Mary Magdalene, Noli me tangere [Do not touch me] is to be the emblem of western painting which in renouncing the universe of the palpable acquires the vision of the interdiction of touch upon which it is founded, numerous contemporary works call upon the palpable within the confines of 'painting'. In certain of Szajner's works, it is rather the spectator who is touched by an airborne tactile sensation erupting on one part of the body or another like a whisper.

Fruit of the most advanced technology though they be, Szajner's work calls upon nature and its elements to the greatest degree; rain, wind, the rhythm of day /night, open to the cosmos where the Earth and the Moon meet and touch with the same poetry, the infinite grandeur of the stars and the infinite smallness of a blade of grass or a firefly on a summer's night. Emotion and affect are on alert.

Let's return to the works themselves, first of all the intense Ran [Chaos], a luminous and resonant installation that offers a plunge into what appears to be grass. Gigantic grass rustled by the wind, which winds through it. Titles are important tot his artist who borrows from different languages: English, Latin, Portuguese, Japanese, and French in order to be as close as possible to the meaning of the piece. In Japanese, Ran means Chaos, a lack of order, which the artist seeks nonetheless to contain within the limits of a frame, simultaneously restricting what can be seen and suggesting the infinite nature of that which is unseen.
To create a work not of a landscape, a garden or a bouquet of flowers, but rather to present the truth of a field.
Szajner does not render this effect realistic with splashes of intense green, but rather with the help of the computer that gives life and movement to the metallic stems jetting out of a foam carpet.
The deft manipulation of the outlandish scale of the natural element renders it that much closer, and the spectator is plunged into the here and now of the man-sized grass's movement, rustled by the wind, with no hope of turning back. In a 1978 landscape, Francis Bacon painted from a photograph of grass.
He only allows a little stretch of grass to survive. Applying himself to the landscape, Bacon wished to capture its essence- and its essence was grass, just as elsewhere, wishing to define what we might term the Sea, Bacon dedicated himself to distilling the sea as closely as possible in the form of a wave crashing against a beach. This would become 1988's Jet of Water. In Bernard Szajner's work, the green beams of light move and fold in upon themselves before the spectator, they display themselves there, on the same floor, in the same depth of space as the person watching. Behind these moving green stems rises a crazy blade of grass, punctuating the rest, a blade of red grass. It punctuates, like the frame places in front of the piece, Chaos. A rhythmic chaos, for Szajner's work holds a soft spot for paradoxes and oxymorons. The second version of this piece, where light and color intervene differently creating a consonant sub-marine space is entitled such a way as to speak volumes [The Definite Infinity Enigma].

In this way, opposing impulses are united, as in Prazeres  [The Death of Pleasure], where Eros and Thanatos ore convoked, as the title indicates, to a curious nocturnal rendezvous in the moonlight as a simultaneously ascending and descending disc crosses the rigorous geometry of a staircase. A meditation on the ephemeral character of human pleasure, and that of life itself, shown 'more geometrico', at the intersection of a disc and a stairway, caught in the movement of climbing and descending. With Szajner, the work is always born at the confluence of multiple semantic networks, where the plastic element mixes inextricably with the meaning it carries and which carries it.
The staircase here is above all the happy geometric meeting of two right angles which touch at the angle and the repeat themselves, striking the eye of the artist like a circle or an oblique angle, the visual souvenir of voyages, for example in Italy, where the artist was seized by the perfection of their layout. Prazeres is the name of a cemetery in Lisbon, called cemitério dos Prazeres [The Cemetery of Pleasures], the movement of ascent and descent mean to represent life and death.

Nonetheless, the finished work adroitly conceals the extreme impulses which animate its thought, the calm movement which orchestrates the pieces amongst themselves repeating ad infinitum has something incantatory which subjugates one's attention. Life, death, geometry, mathematics, like the calculation of the number of syllable in Haïku, the infinitely large and the infinitesimally small approached with the same interest, there is an undeniably Pascalian side to Szajner. The man is a reed, like these blades of grass-human-size-reeds in Chaos.
In the same way, of the heart of the genesis of This island 'I', a work composed of two discs situated at different heights representing Earth, the Moon and a sun, circling around the Earth, a text written in white chalk on a black surface and a mirror " too small to reflect the entirety of my grandeur ", Szajner writes : " I have placed myself at the center of the universe and this place suits me. As an enlightened egotist, I understand that isolated on my island, I blindly gave myself up to the solitary pleasure of immeasurable narcissism. ".
The man this " milieu between all and nothing " of Pascal can once again be invoked in Haïku, a piece which measure the infinite stretch of a limitless night with the miniscule lights of fireflies. Haïku is a trajectory of luminous white lines crossing the black space like writing of which nothing remains but the thin trace concentrated into incandescent points of ephemeral lights flitting about like nocturnal insects.
Between the two infinities of grandeur and smallness rests the man who both perceives and measure himself against them at the same time.
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Yet Szajner's work would not have all its range were it not for its unique relation to the time he works in. If, by using the most advanced technology in realizing his installations, his work is of our epoch, it remain nonetheless rich with the memory of another time, a bygone era " when A was an Aleph and carried within it a multitude of meanings before sinking into the deep sleep of oblivion " as he wrote about the Phoenician alphabet he loves so much. Of a time that found its rhythm in the alternance of the meter 5-7-5 of Haïku, to the time implicated in the memory of dead languages of Inde Deus abest and ancient alphabets, in the presence of ancient artworks nourishing his own, to the time linked to the perception of his work, implying a certain duration, up to the anxious questioning as to the future of the world where the old humanistic landmarks so dear to the artist disappear, time never ceases to impose upon his work.
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Bernard Szajner can therefore express in " One Second from Absurdity… " the wish that he would desire to offer to all mankind the possibility of one single second too save themselves from their race towards oblivion.
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Margherita LEONI FIGINI