Solitude
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- Solitude
- Samotność
- 1967
- typscript and ballpoint pen (with artists notes) on paper
- 27 x 21 cm
"Samotność" is a very good example of a visual numerical text, and it is one of the earliest and most radical that Stanisław Dróżdż ever made. It presents an unusual record—a humble sequence of typewritten numbers, or more to the point: a tautologically repeated number “1” (in an array of 30 x 52). Here, solitude appears as a complex experience. It is not “solitary” or “one one,” but rather many ones (1,560, to be exact) arranged together. The playfully “boring” flatness of the composition reveals a dialectic of the number “one” (1) and the many “ones” (1,560) only after we learn the work’s title. It would seem that solitude is not a matter of the number one, being one, or being lonely as one—but a matter of repetitiveness: of our life, of time, of gestures. As mentioned by Dróżdż, this series was always made using one specific font and could not appear in any other font—a fact that was important for its visual effect. "Solitude" embraces both the existential and numerical tendencies in Dróżdż’s work. These were developed in larger projects (such as "Numerical Texts / Teksty cyfrowe") during the 1970s, projects that involved more dynamic combinations of more numbers “running to zero.” In the right corner of the piece of paper on which Solitude was made, the artist’s hand-penned note reads: “fill in, develop, e.g. numbers spread out diagonally in different directions.” B.P.