24/09/2011 - 29/10/2011
opening reception on 23rd of September btw 5&10 pm
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The opening is a part of:
Where is Art? 17 openings in 2 days. Warsaw, September 23-24, 2011
www.whereisart.pl
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NOT ALL FRAGMENTS ARE COMPLETE
Every work of visual art is representation of the body. To say this is to say that we see bodies, even when there are no one, and that creation of a form is to some degree creation of a body.
James Elkins, Pictures of the Body.
This series is about intimacy and carnality. In Dorota Buczkowska’s drawings fragments stop short of making up a complete whole while mysterious shapes reminiscent of body parts or organs dominate the scenery. There are also geometrical polyhedrons – like models of these organic figures, only more precise. They all appear in the eye of a viewer in a similar fashion as graphic representations in the atlas of human anatomy with even the minutest capillary in the darkest place is clearly visible; delicate strokes of a crayon.
Why not all fragments are complete ?l A fragment is a piece of something else and exists only in relation to that of which it is a part. Incompleteness may mean impossibility of making a reference to a whole or an absence of anything that could be identified as a whole. In this sense each picture is a finite unity and bears no reference other than to itself. This absence has been a part of an original plan from the start. What about carnality, so vividly evoked by these sketches?
The carnal connection mentioned above exists not only on a visual plain but also on a material level. Colorful shades and outlines have actually been made with everyday make-up cosmetics. This gesture at once invites intimacy and creates distance. The distance is introduced on a formal level, by the force of the fact that the usual painterly implements have been denied their raison d’etre and replaced by a profane object. Intimacy comes from the personal and bodily context of make-up (here, itself a fragment -that of every day reality) which it gets done in the morning and wears off throughout the day only to make room for a . Make-up may also be interpreted in terms of reference to the art of painting – individual, when it concerns an activity of a particular person but also collective, as a ritual repeated by a certain group. As Lauren Berlant wrote, the intimacy of everyday life is laid out by contradictory needs; people want to get stripped but remain in control nonetheless, they are caring but aggressive, they want anonymity and they want fame – all at the same time. To think of intimacy is to make an assessment of what we were like, of how we live and how we can imagine a life with more sense than the life of most. Creation of a form is also creation of a body.
Z.M.C.
Dorota Buczkowska, Untitled, 2011, 50 x 35 cm,
pencil, crayon, cosmetics
Dorota Buczkowska, Untitled, 2011, 50 x 35 cm,
pencil, crayon, cosmetics
