Reviews

By Steven Litt
Source: The Plain Dealer, Cleveland, Ohio

Most exciting is a collection of brilliantly colored paper constructions by Mario Kujawski...Shaped like minimalist wedges and crescents, the...compact tabletop sculptures are called "Cunas" (cradles) because they rock back and forth when touched with a finger. Colored in blazing hues with richly textured splashes of paint, the works seem to radiate tropical heat.

The Hispanic connection in Kujawski's work is that the sculptures evoke the tradition of making masks, pinatas and flowers from paper. But Kujawski's work transforms that tradition by fusing it with a broader understanding of abstract art. They're eyecatching...objects with a power that belies their small scale.

Mario Kujawski: An Appreciation
By Douglas Max Utter

Harmony, balance, and beauty have been the watchwords of Mario Kujawski's art through more than three decades of activity. There is more than a little of the utopian hopefulness and spiritual ambition typical of high modernism in much of Kujawski's sculpture and graphic work. And yet there is also something else, something more nuanced and harder to pin down. As Sir Francis Bacon famously observed, "There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion."

In Kujawski's case this tendency may be traceable to the cultural complexity of his origins, a chiaroscuro of radically different geographies and perspectives that alternately shadows and illuminates the artist's relationship to form and surface, and ultimately to content. The broad, rich light of the pampas of Argentina where he spent much of his childhood, the spiritual, historical depth and shade of Judaism, mix with the time spent in Frankfurt am Main and his studies in New York and Madrid, Spain, as well as his long residence in Ohio. The result of this heady mix of languages, cultures, and radically different aesthetic environments is a range of sculpture and two dimensional art that seems always to allude to the human spirit, with I think more than a hint of the fundamental textuality that underlies Western cultural heritage in general, and Jewish heritage most of all. It's as if each of the formal elements Kujawski uncovers in his various procedures is part of a great, unspoken sentence, syllables in a conversation with history and with God. This is perhaps particularly true of his recent works, which he calls "prayer sticks." These loose constructions of natural material like bark and twigs are bound together in various configurations. Some are made to hang on a wall, others are mounted on pedestals; some occupy a single plane, others seem like outlines of three -- or four, or more -- dimensional objects. Typically extending no more than a foot or so in any direction, they seem like battered shelters built for the rolled-up prayers on hand-made paper that Kujawski includes in them. But I also think they are like invocations in their own right, extending trembling visual essays into the spiritual and psychological space that at once separates and joins us to God.

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Healing Art, Northern Ohio Live magazine, September
2004. Read >>