Graphic designer, author of posters, paintings, collages, drawings, illustrations, books and graphic signs, professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. He has won numerous competitions in Poland and abroad. His works are in the collections of museums and galleries in Berlin, Budapest, Essen, Helsinki, Hong Kong, Lahti, Mexico City, Mons, Paris, Beijing, Poznan, Toyama, Trnava and Warsaw.

His paintings, collages or posters are, like haiku, the art of suggesting meanings without revealing them completely. It is a world in which nothing is literal, a world full of freedom, tenderness, intelligence and humour, which is in keeping with the best achievements of the masters of the Polish School of Posters of the second half of the 20th century.

Writer and poet from the canton of Vaud

Her sober, musical poetry, with its sparkling images, is enchanting in its simplicity, often compared to the haiku style. Her work has won several awards (Prix Rambert, Prix des écrivains vaudois, Grand prix de littérature française hors de France de l'Académie royale de Belgique ; Grand prix national de la poésie française).

Presentation of Anne Perrier: Renata Latała

Recitation of poems: Elsa Cailletaud, Renata Latała

For more than twenty years, Ryszard Kajzer has been creating in his posters a very personal and peculiar living gallery of brilliant and friendly image-text motifs, whose first task is to attract the viewer's eye and hold it for a longer period of time. The lured gaze, however, does not fall into the trap of prescribing a particular way of thinking. It is a world in which nothing is literal; it is a world full of freedom, tenderness, intelligence and humour, which is in keeping with the best achievements of the masters of the Polish School of Posters of the second half of the 20th century, and especially of one of its greatest representatives, Henryk Tomaszewski, whose posters can be found in many of the world's prestigious collections of contemporary art. For both Tomaszewski and Kajzer, the poster is above all a specific way of thinking, which can be compared to writing a haiku. The idea is to suggest, in the most synthetic form possible, a certain atmosphere, a mood of the subject presented. The rest is up to the viewer.

In a series of paintings and collages created especially for this exhibition, Kajzer introduces us to his very personal reflection on trees. The artist observes them with his characteristic tenderness, and delights in these natural phenomena, which can live for hundreds of years, forming unexplored root corridors in the ground or suddenly coming to life from a dead trunk. But that is not all: trees are witnesses and symbols of history like the birch tree, whose linguistic declensions in Birke 's painting remind us of Poland's geopolitical location, with all its consequences. Trees are also, of course, a pretext for entering into non-obvious associations, signs, colour, atmosphere and even smell and sound. This is encouraged by the series of almost abstract rhythmic collages, Seasons, which suggest the passage of time, or the painting The Woodcutter, from which you can almost smell the sweet fragrance of a felled tree.

Kajzer's work proves that the specific form of imagery invented by the founders of the Polish School of Posters, based on a synthetic sign, is not reserved for posters. The artist's painterly language, as in his graphics, is fundamentally simplified, minimalist, with paint laid flat. We are in a world which, in terms of technique and motifs, emerges from the poster, but quickly autonomises, because reception here is not necessarily as immediate as in the poster. The viewer's gaze slowly follows the slightly spilled paint or traces contours that lose their poster-like sharpness. So there is much more space for personal reflection here, as well as for an even more subtle reception of typography, in the use of which Kajzer is a master like few others!

The title of the exhibition 'Arbrochements' is a neologism formed from a combination of the French word 'arbre'-tree-and 'rapprochements', which means 'close-ups', 'comparisons', as well as 'unification'. The combination of these two words suggests a cordial invitation to enter the pictorial world of Ryszard Kajzer, to get closer to his subjective and sensitive view of trees, as well as to his very personal visual language, which sits between figuration and abstraction and testifies to the still living and inexhaustible richness of the heritage of the Polish School of Posters art. The juxtaposition of paintings with posters and collages in the exhibition is not to compare the tree motifs, the use of typography or the techniques used. After all, works on paper are also distant traces of trees.

Katarzyna Matul, Exhibition curator