“I Shall Never Return”

In the performance of “I Shall Never Return”, Kantor recapitulates his life and work. This and other activities the artist engaged in in that period are dominated by retrospection. In the second part of the performance, Kantor evokes the memory of his performance of “The Return of Odysseus” (1944), which marked his independent work. In “The Return of Odysseus” Kantor suggested that the road should be travelled along according to the following scheme: leaving one’s ‘place’ – returning to it; identification of the ‘place’ to which one could return is only possible through the consciousness of one’s mentality, character and identity. In “I Shall Never Return” the necessity of going on that journey was shifted by the artist to the domain of personal retrospection. On the canvases of the paintings he created back then, entitled “Damn! I’m Falling!” or “The Return Home”, Kantor – in relation to the lines he himself delivers on stage in “Monologue-Testament” – falls head first towards the landscape of what can be recognized as Wielopole Skrzyńskie (the place where he had been born and raised) with the shape of a church as a peculiar icon of his mental journey. The image is to be found in almost all his last paintings. It helps Kantor initiate the axis of the beginning and the end, determine the path of his travel.