Jadwiga Sawicka is endowed with exceptional existential insight. She is one of those artists who, instead of listening to herself, is an instrument for eavesdropping on the world. This is not the world of politics, the maelstrom of identity, or the dread of globalization - although such concerns sometimes appear as a backdrop. Her world is eternal; it does not depend on transient problems. Human emotions make up her world.
These are not the feelings seen in films or prattled on about insistently in confessions. They are feelings lodged at the very bottom of the soul, the basic feelings that are almost inexpressible - sighs, loss, yearnings, intimations of disappointment, stifled pettiness, joy underlain with visions of sorrow, and helpless melancholy. These feelings elude form, and yet - perhaps for that very reason - they determine everything. They construct the personality, and they rip it apart. Many people sense them, psychologists attempt to grasp them, but hardly anyone can express them. These feelings are so delicate and vague that the touch of form kills them. Yet artists manage from time to time to find a way of referring to these feelings. Then art history rewards them generously. This is no whim, because imaging these feelings requires outstanding sensitivity and formal control. Some gestures go too far, others are clumsy, and the feeling for which the painting sets a snare fails even to appear, crushed beneath a misplaced comma. The formal precision required to convey the "feelings at the bottom of the soul" can be highly stressful for the artist. And it can demand the development of a whole new formal strategy.
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Sawicka operates in several media, among which painting is surely the gold standard. The multiplicity of media and their hierarchy has crucial significance in the depiction of clothing. The starting point, embracing an object taken from reality and changing it into a presentation ready for further "discussion," is photography. The clothing appears in a realistic scale, perfectly clear, colorful, and very sad. The longing for a person, the strong sense of the absence of a person, emanates from these photographs. But this is only a small part of the success. A goal emerges, but not the most important one. The photography of clothing is associated with the helplessness of the dead body, nicely laid out, colorfully and coquettishly awaiting reanimation. Painting surveys this moribund readiness and initiates the act of resurrection. With one "Let there be!" from the medium's power, the inert clothing or paper mask turns into a living emotion. The transformation is so intense that it creates the impression of life being breathed into the painted image. The painted clothing vibrates with motion, blurts out some sort of stifled confession, attempts to say something, but—fortunately—cannot quite find the words. It changes into the energy of tangled, inexpressible feelings. In comparison with the respectability of photography, it seems drunk. Sculpture looks on at this contention between photography and painting, and provides a commentary of its own-the utility of which, perhaps deliberately, is unclear, even as sculpture makes it possible to fulfill the "interpretational deformation" of the object through the use of media: photography stiffens the shape of realism, painting animates it with feeling, and sculpture mocks it with bluntness. The contention among these deformations is a survey of the symbolic efficacy that a media assault liberates in the object. Painting wins hands down, because it is in painting that the departure from the object and the obliteration of its meaning appears most forcefully, followed by the symbolic transformation of the object into feelings, the real into the emotional, and the definable into the sensible.
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Each of these subjects, and there will be more of them, has a great talent for traumogenic words in its manipulative nature. These words have their methods for infiltrating language: they grow dull with use, stop being noticeable, but never cease infiltrating the emotions. This strategy of ostensive non-presence guarantees their power over people. There is nothing worse than symbols hanging around in disorder and apparently without any purpose, waiting for a mood or a moment of weakness. Jadwiga Sawicka restores life to these words (these clothes), dragging them up to a level where they start being visible. As a result, their emotional force submits to conscious reflection. The emotional manipulator ends up in the prison of the intellect. It is subjected to the rigor of a system, arranged according to resemblances, and exposed to view. Jadwiga Sawicka's artistic strategy is not, of course, a social message or an attempt at helping. Authentic and justified at the highest level, it is a genuine confrontation of egos between artistic sensitivity and the slings and arrows that reality aims at such "weaknesses." Nor is there any contradiction here between egoism and the empathy that was mentioned at the beginning. Yet it is a miracle that this "private matter" penetrates to the intuition of culture and, for many people, alters the taste of words and images. "The word gives us the chance to experience Being. It cannot be rational, but only poetic and metaphorical. Only thus does it make it possible to hack out a clearing in the center of the imagined forest in which people find themselves."
Anna Maria Potocka,
director of CCA Bunkier Sztuki, Cracow
www.bunkier.art.pl
www.potocka.moma.pl
