Jacek Dłużewski

White Goat I (in Memory of Zenon Polus)
2000-2020, oil, canvas

White Goat II (in Memory of Zenon Polus)
2020, oil, canvas, 1

White Birches
2020, oil, plastic

White Goat

Such was the assumption that everybody talks about it, although no-one has seen it. Artists speak about art as a white goat that is elusive, constantly escapes. Art as white goat exists only in a conviction that it exists. Like an ideal, ideally white and pure is art which symbolically is called 'white goat'.

Such were conversations with Zenon Polus we had in various circumstances at a certain time in my and Zenek's life. This must have been around 20 years ago, when we were preparing pieces for our joint installation, on Zenek's initiative, at the Lubuska Land Museum in Zielona Góra, as part of the Institute of Art Exhibition.

The joint work was a form of artistic letter-writing to one another on the matter of white goat's presence, or rather the matter of its universal absence. Letters, in the form of paintings, were hung opposite each other on the gallery walls. They were connected by an elongated common table-board, perpendicular to the letters. At its ends, each of us made their own mark as a form of initiating a common conversation.

It so happened that, a month earlier, I had returned from Damascus and in a painting, representing reminiscences from my stay in the city as well as being a letter to Zenek, I included an information that I had not met the white goat. To this day, I am in doubt whether I was close to the truth, writing those words.

Such a wide goat, however, was witnessed by me 20 year later on an old postcard, with the caption: N. 3 - Damas. Bazar du Lanjakdar. <<Edit. B. Asfar. Damas>>. It is walking there, impudently, on a small tin roof of some bazaar.

— Jacek Dłużewski