Bulletin du Musée National de Varsovie (36.1995)

the composition and free themselves from materiał constraints. Floating and
dematerialization take place when the effect of transparency and weightlessness
is achieved together with contrasts of light and shadow, negative and positive.
By means of photographic effects which could not be achieved at that time in
painting, light is allowed to filter through certain planes, while others remain
unpenetrated. Occasionally shapes of a disparate naturę discharge energy or
become deformed or deconcentrated, and all of this affects the architecture of
this microcosm. One feels that the artist is communicating a story that has
a universal dimension. The transformation of a reality borrowed from the
outside world into biological or crystalline forms leads to the formation of
cosmic landscapes in which the rhythms of meandering forms and lines exist in
a State of dynamie eąuilibrium. All of a sudden, with the systematic inerease in
the distance between the real world and the newly-imagined one, the artist
turns his thoughts to man’s existential situation. Humań figures once again
appear in his abstract visions of condensed or diluted matter. These newly
reanimated “Romantics”,13 exploiters of the virgin world of the artist’s
imagination, will become the reflection of his spiritual change, his feelings and
vacillations, his changing mental States. Hiller recorded his observations and
experiences regularly and took various decisions in an attempt to free himself
from so-called “strokes of luck” or “irresponsible intuitive actions”. He did not
restrict himself to the mutual interaction of colours and planes, lines and
spaces; he offered a study of the changeability of life, an account of his current
emotional States.

Karol Hiller was killed in December 1939 at the age of 48.14 This was
almost two years after his one-man exhibition, and in that time he painted over
a dozen works and was preparing a new portfolio of Heliographics, which, like
the first, was to contain 30 prints (Figs. 4,5,6). Most of the work in this
portfolio was known until recently only from the trial prints. The newly
rediscovered part of the print run shows that Hiller was able to preserve his
personal style and to maintain a balance between the real and the imagined.

The creation of a closed system of meanings, the defining of the elements of
a structure and setting out the principles of the formation of an intellectual
abstraction is a lengthy process. Nonetheless it is up to the artist to cause
something which existed in another reality to be defined, singled out and
brought back to life. These processes can take place at an intellectual or
intuitive level and it is impossible to determine which way will be chosen.
Frequently it is not even possible to distinguish between a naturally formed
work and a construct that has been created hy mathematical means. The mind

13 Romantics is the title Hiller gave to one of his figurative heliographic compositions of c. 1939
(National Museum, Warsaw, inv. no. GR W. 4652). This is the only known example of a titled
heliograph by the artist. At the Warsaw exhibition (January 1938) he used the generic title of
Heliographic Portfolio, but the individual prints were not even numbered.

14 Hiller was arrested by the Gestapo on 10 November 1939 and was executed probably on
7 December 1939.

77