Eklipsen

Alicja Wasilewska Von Alicja Wasilewska



`Is it worth explaining an eclipse? Not always, not really. Instead, it is worth watching it. Eclipses, the exhibition of Katarzyna Karpowicz’s work at the Płock Art Gallery is an excellent opportunity to do just that. This is the first solo presentation of the artist’s work of this magnitude, including recent works – from 2022 – shown for the first time.

Katarzyna Karpowicz
Katarzyna Karpowicz

Usually, we expect good paintings to provide an epiphany, a revelation or a discovery of something before us that we could not clearly see ourselves. Can an eclipse be an epiphany? This is worth checking out by visiting the PAG.

There will be no trouble with recognising Katarzyna Karpowicz’s paintings among the hundreds that in two or three decades will illustrate the outlines of ‘Polish art of the first half of the 21st century’. It has been more than a dozen years since the painter graduated from the Krakow Academy, and successive exhibitions confirm that what is most characteristic of her work – although the accents change – remains constant. Firstly, it is an overriding interest in others. Most of Karpowicz’s paintings are multi-person scenes, scenes thick with tangled lines of gaze, multiplied by mirror images. It is not so easy to find those willing to paint complex, non-obvious human relationships. For some mysterious reason, it is easier to see a headless crowd or a battle scene in Polish art than what fills our everyday life, i.e., a semi-conscious ritual of gestures, poses and touches, if not real then all the more intensely imagined. It is perhaps the most important element among those present in Karpowicz’s paintings. Masks float on its surface, reminiscent of Carl Gustav Jung’s dark current of writing about the human personality. The slender, androgynous nature of the artist’s painted figures is notable. It is worth looking at them bearing in mind the Jungian opposition of anima and animus. Apparently, one is a shadow of the other. From the shadow it is not far to the title motif, to a spectacle similarly complex to the one between human bodies and fantasies, to a spectacle that cyclically takes place high above our heads. Combining human and non-human, cosmic, distant rituals in a single painting, the painter draws on the ancient tradition of European painting from the early modern period. At that time, one still remembered the mimesis between the human body and the celestial bodies, their direct connection, which was called melothesia. This is an interesting complement to the earlier inspirations: surreal enigmatic, slightly erotic tension, reflected, as in Balthus, in the mirrors of the steep, flatly painted perspectives of the Neue Sachlichkeit.

Freely, with panache, in long, thick strokes, Karpowicz paints the spectacle of life. She paints it in such a way that when we look at successive paintings, we are reminded of the old Latin title De revolutionibus orbium coelestium. Although it is more of a twisting and turning of human bodies the effect is similar: an eclipse, sometimes long, sometimes total, usually surprising.

The juxtaposition of what generally seems distant to us – celestial rhythms and rhythms pulsating deep within ourselves – forces us to reach for words that are rare, uncommon: conjunction, opposition, syzygy. Syzygy is an elementary situation. A moment when the seemingly opposites merge, collide, spark, bump into each other with gusto. Taking their origin from such elemental catastrophes, from such love accidents, are comets, spreading life into the void.

Karpowicz paints esoteric spectacles in such a way as not to take away hope of seeing harmony. There is a strong, harmonia mundi-like tone of trust in the world in these paintings, there is a sense of entitlement to one’s own and others’ emotions, a right similar to the one sung about long ago by Piwnica pod Baranami in ‘Desiderata’:

‘Take kindly the counsel of the years,
gracefully surrendering the things of youth.
[...] You are a child of the universe
no less than the trees and the stars;
you have a right to be here.’

Astronomical rituals usually required special preparation, a special place. Hence, the headquarters of the Płock Art Gallery itself – a former mikveh, or ritual bath – is also an additional element, making the whole exhibition unique. We show the paintings in a building that was intended for purification, for cleansing, so that a new start can be made once again. Who knows, perhaps taking the plunge and spending a moment eye-to-eye with Eclipses will prove to be a purification that brings relief, a reprieve offering new opportunities under a whole new constellation of events.

We all need such variations of fate very much, and Katarzyna Karpowicz’s paintings increase the chance of this, like any solid crystal mirror, straight out of a dream.

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