Reports on Amorous Incidents
Instructions manual, medical directions, diagram, identikit, outline sketch of a victim’s body, medical record: those are some possible associations with Monika Zawadzka’s art.
The painter draws on the visual codes of our culture which show the human being as anonymous (victim, patient) and uses that visual language to deal with the most intimate matters involving herself: love, sex, complexes, surgeries she’s been through. Although she claims that each and every one of her works is a self-portrait, we do not get to see her face in any of them, nor even an outline of her body. Even figures making love are just dark shapes, reminiscent of the instruction diagrams in „The Art of Loving” by Wisłocka rather than a record of individual experiences. In “Self-portrait for Marek” we see a figure out of medieval manuals on proportion, unnaturally elongated, with a heavy, masculine face. The upper part of the torso is separated from the rest by a long scar running across the middle of the stomach. Only the scar belongs to Monika, she has an identical one on her abdomen. And that’s how far the likeness extends. The rest is for us to guess at.
The excellent drawings through carbon paper are equally mysterious. It is a technique invented and developed by Monika herself. She makes a master drawing first and then copies it or parts of it onto paper. She uses only the light purple type of carbon paper which was used in all government offices under communism. When copying, she produces a thick, fuzzy line in a particularly toxic colour, suggestive of methylated spirit, gentian extract, the light of fluorescent lamps. That is the technique she uses for „body-prints”, the records of amorous incidents, in which fragmented images of feet, hands, heads, breasts overlap and merge. They are made more dramatic through multiplication and movement. Deciphering them requires the precision of an archeologist and the patience of a detective.
Another cycle consists of nine Self-portraits, which are a sequence of diagrams showing how to bandage a head. And again, although the works are titled “Self-portrait”, we won’t find a likeness to the artist in them. The face is a man’s; it is represented synthetically, with patches of colour, and enclosed in an oval cross-section resembling a CT brain scan. Monika found those instructions on the Internet, searching for “occupational health and security”. She used it to tell the story of her own accident. She had fallen while running after a bus. She had broken ribs and serious head injuries. Then there was the hospital, the suffering; in this sense, the pictures of bandaged heads are her self-portrait.
Pain subjected to standardization. As in the intimate drawings through carbon paper, where the outlines of lovers’ naked bodies are mechanically multiplied until the stop belonging to anybody. Zawadzka will do anything to make the characters in her pictures general and non-specific: without age, sex, or distinguishing features. Then she makes them suffer, make love, experience the bliss and physical pain that she has experienced herself.
