PRIVATE AREA 1.
COSMOVISIONS
In Anna Szewczyk's work, interest in man is essential, symbolic and internal. He is not treated descriptively, but rather people, an undefined "we" seen from the author's perspective. This distance is large enough to see only the most important things, and at the same time the most fleeting and closest to man: traces of being in the material and spiritual world, energies, moods and their visualizations in the form of symbols, totems, archaic signs. It is surprising that in non-representational pictures the presence of a human being can be so literal.
After a series of works from 2003-2006. containing totems, symbols of life, objects of primal cults, the author turned to the habitat of wisdom and intelligence, but also demons and fears - towards the human brain. 5cde-3194-bb3b-136bad5cf58d_ This least known organ of the human body is an intriguing and effective tangle of lines, which, being anatomically obvious, still remains a sphere of mystery. For A. Szewczyk, the brain became a microcosm, but also a transition from individual existence to collective existence, it became a metaphor for humanity and the individual, the symbolic duality of "me / us". The brain is the place of speech, reflective thinking and collective self-awareness.
The works presented at the present exhibition feature forms known from previous stages of her work, such as vertical pillars of energy - the first forms of being in the process of creation. They are accompanied by elliptical egg shapes - symbols of the primordial beginning, attempts to tame the world and the individual's place in the world. Vertical compositions can also be read as visualizations of primal sounds referring the viewer to mythical cosmogonies. Symbols give rise to human understanding. But the author transcends the symbolic order, breaks down closed structures, building on this basis her own explanation of what is secret and sacred, rational and constructive. The image makes the spiritual existence tangible, and therefore knowable.
Compositions balance on the border of disorder and confusion, as well as order and accuracy.
In the elliptical composition, we have a clear vertical division of the background (duality of things), and the ellipse line is interrupted in four places. The motifs of the four holes, which are influenced by the energies of the four elements, are often found in the mythologies of many peoples, and are also the four directions of the world. Opposite points of the ellipse connected by a line form a cross symbol. The ellipse and the circle are closed forms, symbols of cyclicality, the repetition of life processes and the shape of the pantheon of gods .
The composition is intriguing horizontally, with a dark, amorphous form placed in the center. In most cultures, the “horizontal” division is connected with the male, luminous, transcendent sphere - above, and with the female, dark, energetic sphere - below.
Everything that exists comes from a pair of complementary opposites "above / below."
The artist also touches on the time parameter. It is present in virtually all compositions presented at the exhibition. Cultural relativity of time and space is related to the order of the life cycle. It may seem surprising, but most primitive peoples live in wholes of fluid space-time. What the man of Western civilization separated and was to reach the essence of this whole only on the strength of A. Einstein's detailed theory of relativity in primitive cultures has always existed as an inseparable unity known by myths. "People achieve the strongest connection with the spirit world through music, because it is believed that performing music, or even thinking (emphasizing EK) silently about the melody and rhythm, evolves and conveys the complex concept of 'unai' (Mythical Time-Space) and from callarirucuguna ( Times-Places of Beginning). "_ Cc781905-5cde-3194-bb3b-136bad5cf58d_
Anna Szewczyk seems to be looking for such 'Times-Places of Beginning' through her art. The exhibition, as a whole, is based on the compositional principle of balance, where on one scale there are feelings, creativity, wildness, emotions, darkness, everything beyond rationality, and on the other: peace, reason, order, God, the sun._cc781905-5cde -3194-bb3b-136bad5cf58d_
The presented images are in shades of gray. Sometimes they are a "drawing" made using the painting technique , maintaining the precision of the drawing and the richness of painting, but most of them are carefully refined painting surfaces, in which white and black create a colorful palette, hiding the_cc781905-5cde-3194- bb3b-136bad5cf58d_ expression of good painting.
March 2009
Elżbieta Kościelak