Concrete is durable, asphalt is durable, a steel fence is durable, a reinforced concrete construction is durable, and so is a concrete flower pot. Only the forces of nature can crush them. In the urban area there is a constant battle for space management, occupying, overgrowing, seizing, capturing, losing and recovering. Spread and sprawl is characteristic both for weeds, as well as for people.
Using French garden traditions and the disciplined German photography aesthetics of Becher's followers , Maciej St?pi?ski brings his own vision of order into the formally chaotic urban area.
St?pinski is fascinated by physical work and artifacts. The construction of roads, a flyover, stairs, the location of a sidewalk or cutting out trees has often more enduring consequences than the idea itself. Outpouring a ton of asphalt on a slope, or can glue by Smithson, Paola Pivi's overturned lorry-trailer, but also the composition of classical landscape paintings emerge as St?pi?ski's natural sources of inspiration.
The regularity of the composition, usually marked by bilateral symmetry is an idea of nature totally dominated and controlled by man, popular in the era of enlightened absolutism. Formal legal despotism manifests itself in the creative process, which is a subject of strict control. For over a decade, Maciej St?pi?ski has been consistently modifying his works by removing some of the elements that could distract attention from what is not the subject of the image. The lack of geographical information, photographic images deprived of time and place depict a boundary between the natural landscape and the city. The things that happen “here and now”, although seemingly nothing happens, often takes place on the invisible frontier designated by man, on the outskirts of reality.
I decide what is ultimately in the image. I do not shoot what is,but what I see. Concrete - lawn. Tree-wall. Shrubs - tin fence. Grass - asphalt. Building - hedge. Man - wall.
There is stillness, the frozen composition is in perfect balance. We have the impression that there is, or was, something else, but it was hidden or ignored. The accustomed eye of the viewer starts to feel uneasy. Here it is in a situation where it does not have to make the selection of what is useless, to constitute what is crucial. The artist's way of creation refers to the Aristotelian thought according to which when the goal is achieved, the movement also fades, and reaching the target implies stillness as the end result.
By removing people from the photos and thanks to the dynamics of creating an artifact, St?pi?ski does not show the action, but what has already been made. The artist institutes Bresson's decisive moment at least twice: during the shoot and the post production. And it's not about the moment the photo was taken and when the motion stops, but about the removal of any signs of movement from the image itself.
The photos were taken in Germany, Austria, Poland and Russia, but that does not have any great significance.The artificiality of nature is an area between artifacts and nature, it is an urban space which people consistently replace by successive post and neo forms. The artificiality of nature can be seen as idiosyncratic, although as a notion it does not exist. Just as what is shown in Stepinski's photos does not, in fact, exist.
It is also possible that the artificiality of nature is not objectively artificial, but is a matter of the person that is looking at it.