Andrzej Bembenek

Without a Jacket Headlong
oil, canvas, 2020

A Memory of One Meeting …..

Kosobudki is a charming place that I was able to reach precisely thanks to my acquaintance with Zenon Polus, after my opening in Łagów, over a dozen years ago. Several days spent there together uncovered before me fragments, scraps of a completely different Zenek than the one I had known from the Institute of Art and Visual Culture, for example, or the city of Zielona Góra. In those places, he seemed infused with art only, gave off the impression of being a barely accessible, mysterious Director, Professor, Artist...

In Kosobudki, there appeared Zenek paring flowers, wading barefoot in an ice-cold rivulet and talking about what grew there, what swam... about its clarity... whirl... taste.... Here was Zenek who brewed tea, bustling avidly around the house... talking about its reconstruction, about reinforcing walls, renovating the roof... about people who most likely had never lived there, about silence, birds, tastes... A contemplative, reflexive, infatuated Zenek.... It was precisely his extra-artistic personality I came to know then that so charmed me and, to this day, I remember it with tenderness, including in my own work...