Crisis
To get closer to Anna Szewczyk's painting, you need to know her attitude to reality. Szewczyk perceives reality as layers that overlap. Layering, on the other hand, has its own rules. The past contained in layers is still present, despite the fact that it seems to be outdated and inactive, but it can be activated at any moment because it is a kind of frozen deposit waiting for the appropriate energy to activate it. The top layer covers the results of past events, i.e. the current reality also becomes a kind of temporary state, as there will be new, future ones. The relations between the layers, however, do not have a direction with the vector directed only towards the top layer or the future, so something important for the current reality may break through. Thus, the reality of a stratified character perceived in this way is of a temporary nature. The tilt that occurs towards the future, however, causes in us a permanent sense of transition and waiting for something to happen. We are constantly trying to name it, define it and sometimes define it. Reality has a constant need to redefine layers and past events that generated them. We experience the ever-changing face of the past layers and their shaping in line with ad hoc expectations, for example for manipulation purposes. Anna Szewczyk treats layers in her paintings in a similar way and subjects them to various manipulations. However, it should be remembered that the layers in Szewczyk's painting are not a representation of reality, but an attempt to show what he succumbs to. In fact, as a result of the coexistence of opposing values, often canceling each other out, the presence of which results from the clash of unplanned or antagonistic elements, past layers that cannot be completely drowned out by subsequent ones, it causes a total misunderstanding and a feeling of being lost in us. When we do not understand something, we often panic, meanwhile, it should be remembered that not everything can be understood. Szewczyk knows about it and that is why he tries to share this awareness with us by creating painting content of such provenance, among other things.
Anna Szewczyk spent a lot of time on very thorough and diligent work in specifying the reasons for her subsequent paintings. The limitation that he applies in the use of white and black has the hallmarks of an escape from any methods of making his painting more attractive. According to the artist, color perceives drama and is too sensual. It can seduce ... Pictures from that time have relations to black and white photography, graphics or drawings. Drawing as an elementary, universal and ubiquitous value. Drawing in the artist's work has always been present and significant for her artistic experiences. White and black definitely
it alludes to this and has an objective character and, in its own particular way, it is aesthetic. Anna Szewczyk perceives reality as structures, layers of purpose and random, good and bad, global and those from the immediate environment. Explainable and inexplicable, meaningful and nonsensical, old and new. Black and white. The works from the beginning of 2008-2016 are very specific and, as the author herself calls them, "rigid". These are black and white structures that more closely resemble inlays or imitations of stones, stucco or patterns on huge old tables from elegant palace interiors. These structures do not represent the observed reality, but its states or contexts, and just like it, they undergo various, unpredictable transformations. Naming
imitating them by the artist, is very important in the context of the content that she is trying to define through a specific structure. Let me remind you that the exemplary states of interest to Szewczyk are intensity, chaos, mismatch, excess, lack or balance. However, let me remind you that the artist is interested in these states as abstracted from reality. They are autonomous values that can be used to make the content of images . The concept of imitation has a special place in art, for example, for example by Jasper Johns, when he resigns from representing space in favor of imitating a two-dimensional surface, a flag or a shooting target or a road sign and is used in accordance with its idea of an image as an object defined by its content. In the case of the artist's paintings, it is about an imitation of the state. The very fact of painting, and thus calling into existence, is for Anna Szewczyk an imitation, , but only thanks to her can she be visually experienced. The work "Antinomia of imitation" from 2013 is the best example of the attitude towards the notion of Anna Szewczyk's imitation. The image itself is the antinomy of imitation, although its content may dialogue with something artificial, so as not to define it as untrue. These pictures are also inlays, "Praforms" from 2009, or "Made in PRL" from 2013, which is a composition of other elements, often alien to each other visually in new specified whole. This is also the case in the pictures from that time. Foreign black and white elements juxtaposed together, not entirely abstract, but also not representative. It is clearly visible that the artist has carefully analyzed various historical styles and ornaments, which allowed her to find a visual finality that, surprisingly, is universal enough to be both contemporary and much older.
In the next stage of painting, Anna Szewczyk uses the language of expression. The "rigid" layers are marginalized and appear only fragmentarily on the edges of the canvas, as on the one hand outdated, and on the other, constantly reminding about their potential. They are as if blurred, stained and the current layer has the dimension of despair, anxiety and even ostentatious declaration of a transitional state. The artist's use of the language of expression evidently refers to anxiety and the unfolding drama with unclear roots, intentions and goals. At this time, interactive painting objects such as "Do it yourself" from 2018, "Puzzle" or "Pyramid" are created. Sometimes it is the current shape of Poland, composed of puzzles about the boundaries relating to our complicated history, given to us as a kind of sum, other times the shape and content give us freedom of arrangement, but it will always be a pyramid from which we will not free ourselves. One of the most interesting paintings, and in fact a photographic realization, is the work "Ornament and Crime" from 2016. Anna Szewczyk first painted black and white hunting trophies (antlers) on canvas under the influence of real ones hanging in the palace in Konopiszcze in the Czech Republic, which as a result is a kind of wallpaper. camera lens on their background. The very fur that the artist is wearing has an interesting natural noble pattern resulting from its cutting, while this wallpaper is a cultural accumulation of crimes. Photographing yourself in a fur coat against the background of an image imitating reality in the form of a wall with antlers is in fact showing the personal entanglement of each of us. We do it both ways. Szewczyk thus shows us what an unclear and unsolvable, complicated ethical situation. Photography as a medium is perfectly chosen here because it has an objectifying character, both documentary and as a kind of evidence. Anna Szewczyk achieved the enormous heartlessness that flows from this realization by painting or rather a painterly imitation of a wall with antlers. A picture is no longer a painting, but a cultural wallpaper, which we are aware of thanks to photography. A black and white picture that was not photographed might refer to the illustrative painting activities we deal with today, and perhaps it would fit in with an existing trend and would have its supporters. However, for the author it is insufficient, because thanks to the content of the whole situation in the photograph presented in this way, she presents us with her attitude to the painting content and contexts that can turn everything upside down. Here we encounter a degradation of the image due to its content placed in the photo. This is undoubtedly achieved by Anna Szewczyk thanks to photography and a very original idea of painting a picture in order to make it the background for a specific photo.
The following images present an internal incoherence, as if it were a desire to achieve the coexistence of inconsistent elements or fragments. They constitute a whole, but are unclear, non-obvious, with content that is difficult to recognize. Quite enigmatic. We are in our own way helpless, as we are faced with the reality over which we think we have control. It seems similar to us here. Such an attitude towards reality and the image leads the artist to a kind of rebellion and the need for elimination, which logically results from the accumulation of an excessive amount of everything. This necessitates reduction and purification. Therefore, in the painting of Anna Szewczyk, there is a need to create a void, to paint freedom from layers and structures, ornament, history and interpretation. Such an attitude may also be a need to free oneself from reality, because, just like reality, the artist treats painting or the idea of an image as an accumulation of layers, an excess of impulses or information. The peculiar chaos resulting from the interpenetrating layers representing the author's experiences and reactions to events, regardless of whether it is the past, the future or the present, is at the limit. It can be stated metaphorically that Szewczyk has brought her painting to the breaking point of recording her own attitude to reality, despite the fact that she focuses on its states and not on its presentation. For it is the state of reality that is real, not the ways of presenting it. Reduction, which is the most current painting problem for Anna Szewczyk, in order to be meaningful, effective and constitute a new quality requires determination and abandonment of all those practiced so far in the creation of artistic ideas, especially in such a medium as painting. The search must take place in conditions in which the existing categories cannot be used, but new ones can be created simultaneously. That is why Anna Szewczyk clearly formulates the need to reject them, because she is aware that it is impossible to find a new one that is not yet specified with what is proven, and therefore safe, because she may not be sensitive enough to react to a new, different kind of emptiness.
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