Wall Itself Serves as a Realistic Canvas : Artist: The space in which Mikolaj Smoczynski exhibits is part of the work.

Polish artist Mikolaj Smoczynski calls himself a realist.

Audiences may think otherwise at his first U.S. show, opening tonight at San Diego State University’s Art Gallery. Minimalism and Expressionism seem to be more dominant than realism.

Smoczynski’s logic, however, is hard to refute.

Smoczysnki, a slim, boyish 35, has used the ordinary walls and floors of galleries and studios as the materials for his art for the past five years. Usually meant as the background for other aesthetic undertakings, in Smoczynski’s work, walls and floor become stages of their own, arenas to explore history, function and form.

“In usual artistic practice, if an artist makes an installation, very often he puts objects into a space,” he explained recently as he prepared the gallery

show, “Work for America.”

“For me, space is important not only as a place for showing work. I want to try to explain the space itself, to show the space and in the end, to understand the space. In this sense, I am a realist. I’m working with reality in a very simple form.”

In galleries in Lublin, where he teaches at the Maria Sklodowska Curie University, and elsewhere in Poland and other European cities, Smoczynski has done “removings,” by gluing layers of bare canvas to the walls and floor, then peeling them back to reveal the hidden history behind the public facades. He hangs the results like paintings, but with the canvas facing the wall, and the textural layers of excavated wall or floor material facing outward.

At San Diego State University, he had also hoped to work with the gallery walls, but when he did a practice run on one small section of the wall, the entire layer of drywall stuck to the canvas and came off. There were no multiple layers of history to work with--just one, and down it came.

For Smoczynski, though, American architecture’s thin, youthful skin is not a drawback.

“This country is very strong, with great energy, and it has only one layer of history generally,” he said. “From a European point of view, America has a great sense of power as such a young country.”

For his show at the gallery, he turned to the floor instead. It, too, consisted of only one layer, but its sculptural possibilities were greater.

“One layer of history is absolutely enough. Archeological discovery, of what was there before, was only the first part of the work. Then I used that material to build my objects.”

Smoczynski’s installation, titled “The Hoisting,” consists of several pyramidal forms, both flat and three-dimensional, surfaced in black floor adhesive or in the linoleum tile peeled off the floor. The pyramid, a form used in ancient Egypt as well as Mexico to connote permanence and stability, has been transformed in Smoczynski’s hands into an ephemeral gesture that will vanish when the gallery is prepared for its next show.

In one room, almost all of the floor has been peeled away to reveal the adhesive, and a large black pyramid rises from the ground. The adjoining room houses three pyramids, one simply painted on the wall with the adhesive, a pair of black-encrusted brushes at its base. (The cost of repairing the walls and floors is covered in the show’s budget.)

Smoczynski’s use of common, mundane materials links him to the Arte Povera work of Mario Merz and others, as well as to the wry, often poetic assemblages and sculpture of British artists Richard Wentworth and Richard Long, whose work he finds inspirational. No direct precedents for Smoczynski’s work can be found in his native Poland, though he points out that avant-garde art first flourished there between the wars and has continued ever since.

On his painted forms at SDSU, Smoczynski uses the same sweeping movements used to apply the floor adhesive for its practical purpose. The thickly covered surfaces hark back to the American Abstract Expressionist artists whom Smoczynski emulated as a student.

When martial law was imposed in Poland in 1981, brushes, paint and canvas came under tight control and Smoczynski stopped painting. Like many artists and intellectuals at the time, he began what one former Polish minister of culture called an “inward immigration.”

He began a series of austere yet elegant black and white photographs of his studio floor and the reflections, furrows of dirt and other patterns that he “painted” on it. A selection of the quietly meditative works is on view in the SDSU show.

“The problems that artists had were problems that all of the Polish community had at this time,” Smoczynski said. “For artists it was a deep intellectual experience. For people so young, like me, this time changed all that was important earlier. It destroyed all illusions about the future under a Communist system.”

Though Smoczynski adamantly denies any interest in making art that directly addresses political and social issues, he acknowledges that his photographs, collectively called “The Secret Performance,” do just that, in an abstract, rarefied way.

“This is my personal experience in my studio. This was my reaction. It’s not that I didn’t think about it.”

But as politics have changed in his native country, with Communism now being suppressed as once it suppressed, so have Smoczynski’s artistic needs.

“When I began working in this series it was the beginning of martial law. I needed to close off from the outside and think about everything. This work for me was always an experience inside, for one man. I needed this personal experience, now I have it. Now it’s time to do something with this experience. It’s why I decided to work with reality. The time of secret performance is over for me.”

Not only for Smoczynski, but for an entire generation of artists in Eastern Europe whose work was kept in the shadows by isolationist, Communist regimes. Now, what was once considered unofficial art has seized a new status, and the art market, hungry for true internationalism, has begun swallowing it up with curiosity and vigor. Since 1988, Smoczynski has had shows in France, England, Brazil and Germany.

Mark Quint, of Quint/Krichman Projects, which is sponsoring the artist’s six-month residency in San Diego and will be hosting another exhibition of his work in the spring, thought it was time for Smoczynski’s work to be known here. Tina Yapelli, SDSU’s gallery director, agreed.

“He’s more of a world-class artist, than just Eastern European,” Quint said. Part of Smoczynski’s appeal is in the novelty of seeing contemporary Polish art, he admitted, but “If I had seen his work in France, I would have been just as interested. Where he’s from is important to his work, but it’s not the core reason he’s here.” Smoczynski’s show opens with a reception tonight from 6 to 8, and continues through March 13.