A monumental wooden form materialises an event belonging to the realm of prophecy: a deadly ray from Saturn. The absurd is treated with full material seriousness — not as a representation of catastrophe, but as an impossible phenomenon that has assumed physical form and appeared in the landscape as though it had actually arrived.

The work grows out of the persistent, recurring need to locate the end of the world at a specific point in the future — to give catastrophe a date, a sign, and the appearance of predictability. Within the work, the year 2025 is treated as one such arbitrary threshold: a moment onto which an undefined anxiety can be projected and given the form of prophecy.

The historical point of reference is the Janowska Group from Upper Silesia, and in particular the circle around Teofil Ociepka associated with it. Within the industrial world of mines and steelworks, a metaphysical order functioned in parallel, one in which everyday reality, painting, occultism, alchemy and Rosicrucian ideas could belong to a single system. In Ociepka’s cosmology, Saturn was not merely a symbol, but part of an order of reality treated with full seriousness.

This history was later pushed still further towards myth by Lech Majewski in his film Angelus, where the occultists of Janów receive a prophecy foretelling the destruction of humanity by a ray from Saturn.

A Ray From Saturn does not, however, illustrate either this history or the film. It adopts their logic.

The ten-metre object appears in the landscape with an incongruity comparable to that of the metaphysical order operating within the material reality of industrial Silesia. What should remain belief, prophecy or fiction is treated as material fact. Wood, construction and monumental scale grant the impossible the authority of an existing thing.

In this way, the work reverses the relationship between absurdity and reality: it does not ask whether the prophecy could be true, but what happens to its absurdity once it is given physical proof.

The ray from Saturn is already here.