“The painter gives off himself with his body, Valery says. And, indeed, one cannot see how a Spirit could paint. It is by lending his body to the world that the painter transforms the world into painting.”
It is the meeting of two such distant spheres, the materiality of the body and the abstractness of thought, that is the theme of the second of three acts in Katarzyna Bak’s Traces project. In this new cycle of works, the artist examines the gesture that results from the interweaving of vision and movement, of thought and action, and is shown as embodied expressiveness on canvas.
Gesture is the material and anatomical act by which the artist traverses the canvas: having surpassed the spontaneity of the first act, in which Bak investigated the possibilities of a trace untethered from any form of intentionality, irrational, devoid of logicality and close to the Surrealists’ Psychic Automatism, the second act marks the shift from the unconscious to the conscious, from the Id to the Ego, the moment when the mediating consciousness between internal drives and the external world takes over. The artist has made this shift clear by giving each act a “tempo” to indicate, as with notation on musical scores, the progress and character of the performance: the lightness and vivacity of the “Allegretto” of the first act is succeeded in the second by the „Andante moderato” tempo, slower and more controlled.
The inner vision, the pulsing of the heart, seek a ways to communicate with the outside world, to make themselves visible and recognizable and to be part of it through a language that can understand what is outside and be understood: it is the need to describe what takes place inside, where drives, energies, flows of emotions are fought, through lines and signs that do not imitate the visible world, but rather attempt to give form to the invisible.
To represent the threshold of the non-visible and to allow thought to control gesture, the signs drawn by the artist stet cores immersed in unlimited space, made of lines that overlap according to different rhythms and times, through movement dictated by internal impressions: just as in moments of anguish time seems to expand and in those of happiness to contract, so too the traces on the sheet, becoming at some moments round, at some sharp, at others interrupted, more confused and blurred, then disappearing only to return again.
The only form suitable for rendering the informality of the inner world is the “non-form,” and Bak restores it by digging within herself, stimulated by external reality and contemplation of nature, to stitch together the threads of her own inner being.
What is astonishing in these works is the swarming of interplay, arising one from the other, one on top of the other, all necessary, chained together as if they were the footprints of an uncertain path or the outline of a suffering and passionate heart. And it is precisely the heart and its invisible life energy that are at the centre of some of the works in the cycle, consisting of the graphic marks traced by the heartbeat: its regular rhythm, based on the combination of internal and external factors, changes. This internal change that refers to the sphere of feelings and emotions becomes visible through the fluctuations of an echocardiogram.
At a deeper level, forms, signs, and occurrences acquire a new significance and seem to refer us to something outside, which has been assimilated by vision and thought and returned to the outside through a process of internalization: reality appears “other” because it is reworked, transfigured according to internal processes and thought in order to be communicated.
edited by Giorgia Fileni