Reference

With the support of Chantal Petit-Cieslewicz, Anna Grabowska-Konwent (The National Museum in Poznan) and Andrzej Klimowski

Welcome to the Posterdrome
Roman Cieślewicz once called Poland the ‘Plakatodrom (poster-drome) … the largest testing ground of the poster in Europe.’ Whilst posters went into decline in much of Western Europe after 1945, in the People’s Republic of Poland they continued to enjoy high status and the attention of creative artists and designers. Images commissioned to announce new films and theatre performances were relatively free of official propaganda or the need to deliver ticket-buying audiences.
Cieślewicz belonged to the second generation of the Polish Poster School. He began his career in the mid 1950s when communist censorship was being relaxed and experimentation welcomed. Within a few years he established a reputation for extraordinary surreal images, often making use of collage.
Often complex and elusive, Cieślewicz’s designs asked the viewer to look and think. Interviewed in 1978 he said ‘a poster is an idea. This is what matters. An idea can excite, can be intriguing ... It was Marcel Duchamp who said “an image which does not provoke is unworthy.”

Ty I JA Magazine
Ty i Ja was first published in 1959 by the Women’s League, an offshoot of the official Polish United Worker’s Party. This would hardly seem an auspicious context for an ambitious magazine. Nevertheless, in the hands of young writers and designers including Cieślewicz, its first art director, Ty i Ja became a remarkably free-thinking publication. The magazine’s editors were far more interested in the thrilling images of revolution offered by the Soviet artistic avant-garde of the 1920s than any ‘official’ Soviet artist of the day. Ty i Ja was full of advertisements, often designed by Cieślewicz, for products which were often almost impossible to obtain.
Under Cieślewicz’s art direction, the magazine had a remarkably idiosyncratic character. He folded a stream of printers’ devices and illustrations from nineteenth century newspapers and school books into its pages, creating strangely vertiginous spreads that undermined its modernity. Victorian cyclists would wheel across pages decorated with distorted and blown-up printers’ ornaments. The magazine’s fashion spreads were ‘borrowed’ from the pages of French Elle and Vogue and then obscured by butterflies’ wings or irreverent doodles.

Guide de la France Mystérieuse
In1963, he was commissioned to produce illustrations for books and magazines in France. One key work was a complete alphabet for this gazetteer of ghosts, historic crimes and myths in 1964.
He brought architectural structures and inanimate objects to ‘life’ with human limbs and organs. In this regard, Cieślewicz’s designs tapped into a long tradition of seeing human bodies in letters that can be traced back to the sixteenth century. His letters were also indebted to surrealist Max Ernst’s enigmatic collage works of the 1930s.

The double life of an art director
In 1963 Cieślewicz moved to Paris, embarking on an impressive career in periodical publishing and advertising. After working on Elle, Vogue and other glossy titles, he was made art director of MAFIA, the celebrated advertising agency established in 1969. Working with photographers like Guy Bourdin and Helmut Newton, Cieślewicz operated as a ‘service optique’ for corporations and commercial chains.
Cieślewicz designed the layout and ten powerful covers for the art magazine Opus, first published in 1967. Although by no means as revolutionary as the shrill Maoist and anarchist voices, Opus was nevertheless infected with radicalism. Its writers protested against the ‘Alice in Wonderland’ world of advertising and celebrated the vibrant life of contemporary Cuba and the Soviet Union in the 1920s.
In the 1970s Cieślewicz became a freelance illustrator and designer. Commercialism remained, however, a necessary compromise. ‘I work for institutions which pay me, in order to be able to work for those who have no money.’

Mirror Worlds
Around 1970 Cieślewicz started producing what have been called ‘centred collages’. These screen-prints emerged from his interest in doubled images and in the aesthetics of the copy. Working with lines of symmetry, he composed mirror images in which bodies seem to form strange headless outlines or familiar faces take on the appearance of the Cyclops. What is missing or obscured is as significant as what is visible. 
Cieślewicz sought to delay perception. He used rasters to dissolve familiar images into dots. The thick inexorable blackness of the ink suggests deep shadows. For critic Urszula Czartoryska, Cieślewicz ‘obliterates a picture’s readability’ through these techniques, to encourage a new kind of attention on the part of his audience.

A Constructivist in Paris
In the mid 1970s Cieślewicz began a long collaboration with the Centre Georges Pompidou, the major art centre in the heart of Paris which was formally opened to the public in 1977. Cieślewicz – who had left the claustrophobic world of communist Poland – proved remarkably skilled at reinterpreting the graphic language of constructivism for the Centre’s publicity and in other designs of this period. His use of block lettering and dynamic composition – in the manner of Alexander Rodchenko – owed much to his experiences in Eastern Europe. As a student, he had sought out the last living members of the pre-war avant-garde (‘real communists’ as he called them).

When Cieślewicz died in 1996, he had worked on both sides of the Cold War divide; he had explored the dreamworlds of surrealism as well as the party lines of constructivism; and he had worked for media corporations and for partisan publishers. Cieślewicz often described his work as a form of visual journalism: ‘I consider that journalism is the closest profession to me and I would be lost without them. They operate the message and I the picture.’ 
According to Anna Grabowska-Konwent, ‘Cieślewicz was lucky enough not to believe in ideologies and never worked for any system; on the contrary, he repeatedly tried to unmask it.’