Kaleidoscope (Under the Stairs)

A year ago I visited a dark cellar housing Under the Stairs Gallery where a young painter from Lublin, Małgorzata Jastrzębska, was having her first exhibition in Warsaw. I looked at the walls covered in her hanging paintings and I felt dizzy.

It felt as if someone was holding a giant kaleidoscope tube to my eye and kept on turning it restlessly. Multicoloured circles were spinning, falling out from behind, crossing and bumping into each other. A similar vitality characterises the painting of Robert and Sonia Delaunay, however what I saw there had been executed differently. Małgorzata Jastrzębska has rejected picturesque-ness of orphism. Her forms have sharp edges – one can tell she uses a masking tape when painting to make the separation of the colours unequivocal and definite.

Although she paints with a soft brush and oil paints it looks as if she was using a compass and a scalpel. There are mathematics and physics textbooks on the table in her studio.

However what makes me most astounded is the fact that her brave, complicated canvases are created without a prior sketched out composition. This artist needs no sketches! Is it because the forms and colours in her paintings are conceived as naturally as thoughts in one’s head?