artist statement
For me, the content of a painting is less important than the way it is told—because the painterly gesture is a language of its own. Each new painting becomes a search for the grammar of that language, like an archaeologist deciphering a culturally significant record.What interests me most is the question of illustrativeness—how much of it a painting can contain and still retain its meaning. Where is the boundary, and when does a painting cross it to become 'overly illustrative'—and thus awkward, shallow, or invalid? I explore these tensions through paintings on canvas and paper, as well as papier-mâché objects, using naïve imagery and irony as my primary tools.There are countless ways to spend one’s time and build a career, and painting may not be the most sensible of them. There is no external demand for it, and that is precisely what makes painting difficult. Its value must be justified from within. Therefore, the themes that strongly resonate in my work include the search for justification in artistic practice, the awkwardness of the aspiring creator, and the tension between the fragility of imagination and the solidity of the world.It feels awkward to speak about painting—like being asked to narrate language. Yet artists are expected to explain themselves, for example to make statements. Image and text are fundamentally different, yet inseparably intertwined. Words unfold one after another, while the image remains silent—and the story, told without a clear reason, inevitably brings up the question: who is speaking?I tell stories about the tools of the painter—brushes, stretcher bars, pigments—and about the painter herself: the one who looks and sees. It is the story of someone who is both observer and observed, acutely aware of being seen. It is also the story of someone who made an irrational career choice, and now lives with its consequences—still believing that the more abstract the problem one chooses to face, the more meaningful its solution might be. That is why I think that painting is the practice of loving something that exists, even though it doesn't have to.
Embedded Files
for the catalogue of my solo show at Munipal Gallery bwa in Bydgoszcz, 7.05-15.06.2024
My first meeting with Alicja is of a business nature. Early afternoon, a sunny studio and coffee – served in a mug you can hide behind and pretend to drink when you have nothing to say. Alicja talks to two other artists about the upcoming exhibition, which I will be writing about as usual. For a long time, I have made most of my contacts as a producer of occasional literature. The circumstances are different each time, so I have no way of settling in and, despite the experience, I still feel new. If I have a certain authority (and I think I do, since I have been approached), it is primarily because, for some reason, some people believe in it. Everything depends on it, with professionalism being about skilfully sidestepping this issue. In business, art and wherever image is at stake, the old rule of successful romance still applies: you have to set the mood, making awkward gestures meaningful and charming, and for the sake of the cause turn a blind eye to the technicalities of the situation. It may sound ridiculous, but it is serious.Unfortunately, even such a universal method is not always effective. For example, towards Alicja I feel quite helpless, because she talks about everything I would be able to think of, to the point where I begin to doubt whether I have come across anything myself or heard anything from her. She talks, so I don’t have to and I remain silent from behind my mug. Fortunately, once you’ve been taken for wise, it’s terribly difficult to prove your own stupidity, because no one is sure whether such, for example, silence is not latent wisdom. The problem with symbolic capital is that it is quite elusive, so it requires ceremonies to sustain itself. Perpetually evasive content sometimes needs to be pinned down with a strong slogan or gesture. With such occasions in mind, Alicja crafted a set of large paper brushes, which she folded against one of the walls like an altar. With this kind of brush, every art school graduate should be dubbed an artist. We agree that this is a career that often develops in an aura of misunderstanding. The accompanying communication failures used to be masked by a well-known aphorism: what cannot be talked about, must be kept quiet about. Perhaps I am the only one who finds it strange, but it forbids something that is not possible anyway. And we care about that on average, because we can quite a lot and we already have a problem with that. This is precisely Alicja’s theme – the problem of free choice. And mine, since I decided to write about it for her.It starts as early as school. Almost everyone who has studied art has a particular attitude to the experience, often quite critical. Not excluding Alicja. Her Bezgłowy mentor (Headless Mentor), books of Capital made of chocolate coins which is eaten by ventriloquists; her Dobra wiedza (Good Knowledge) and hundreds of general landscapes (outdoor exercises without leaving home) are all undoubtedly a final tribute to the experiences that are not alien to me: attempts to capture image in relation to knowledge. And that’s what is done in school and therefore talked about a lot, by design for teaching purposes and for the sake of art. However, one might get the impression that, on the contrary, art exists precisely so that there is something to talk about. It is an ideal subject because it resists conclusion. The conversation about it can go on indefinitely because it leads nowhere, and it is a pleasure to immerse oneself freely and aimlessly in the speech. It’s not about conclusions, by the way, it’s about a sense of reality. Its boundaries in our case are secured by the work, which stands as it stood, whatever one may say. In this sense, the thing I see is more meaningful than the word, although its meaning does not involve any content. Quite the opposite, with a radical lack of content, which in the vernacular is called depth. When someone invokes depth, there is actually nothing more to say. This is more or less how art discourse develops: as free-style chatter that targets an area outside of speech and is therefore always missed. Consequently, each participant must find his or her own place in it.I once read somewhere that an artist is someone who is so committed to art that they cannot live without it. They create because they have to, which could be called a mission, but just as well an intrusive or unconditional reflex; and that sounds so self-serving. In order to remain independent, the artist must therefore be unique. It is said that a free man does not have to do anything, but such freedom is simply freedom of movement. A vacuum that sooner or later turns into boredom. This is definitely not enough if we want to be alive, because life has the traits of radicalism. Perhaps the most radical choice is precisely the one that cannot be justified, an assault on the instance of sense and common sense. Which is wonderfully in keeping with the condition of the artist, who works in the dark anyway.
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Weronika Wronecka
My first meeting with Alicja is of a business nature. Early afternoon, a sunny studio and coffee – served in a mug you can hide behind and pretend to drink when you have nothing to say. Alicja talks to two other artists about the upcoming exhibition, which I will be writing about as usual. For a long time, I have made most of my contacts as a producer of occasional literature. The circumstances are different each time, so I have no way of settling in and, despite the experience, I still feel new. If I have a certain authority (and I think I do, since I have been approached), it is primarily because, for some reason, some people believe in it. Everything depends on it, with professionalism being about skilfully sidestepping this issue. In business, art and wherever image is at stake, the old rule of successful romance still applies: you have to set the mood, making awkward gestures meaningful and charming, and for the sake of the cause turn a blind eye to the technicalities of the situation. It may sound ridiculous, but it is serious.Unfortunately, even such a universal method is not always effective. For example, towards Alicja I feel quite helpless, because she talks about everything I would be able to think of, to the point where I begin to doubt whether I have come across anything myself or heard anything from her. She talks, so I don’t have to and I remain silent from behind my mug. Fortunately, once you’ve been taken for wise, it’s terribly difficult to prove your own stupidity, because no one is sure whether such, for example, silence is not latent wisdom. The problem with symbolic capital is that it is quite elusive, so it requires ceremonies to sustain itself. Perpetually evasive content sometimes needs to be pinned down with a strong slogan or gesture. With such occasions in mind, Alicja crafted a set of large paper brushes, which she folded against one of the walls like an altar. With this kind of brush, every art school graduate should be dubbed an artist. We agree that this is a career that often develops in an aura of misunderstanding. The accompanying communication failures used to be masked by a well-known aphorism: what cannot be talked about, must be kept quiet about. Perhaps I am the only one who finds it strange, but it forbids something that is not possible anyway. And we care about that on average, because we can quite a lot and we already have a problem with that. This is precisely Alicja’s theme – the problem of free choice. And mine, since I decided to write about it for her.It starts as early as school. Almost everyone who has studied art has a particular attitude to the experience, often quite critical. Not excluding Alicja. Her Bezgłowy mentor (Headless Mentor), books of Capital made of chocolate coins which is eaten by ventriloquists; her Dobra wiedza (Good Knowledge) and hundreds of general landscapes (outdoor exercises without leaving home) are all undoubtedly a final tribute to the experiences that are not alien to me: attempts to capture image in relation to knowledge. And that’s what is done in school and therefore talked about a lot, by design for teaching purposes and for the sake of art. However, one might get the impression that, on the contrary, art exists precisely so that there is something to talk about. It is an ideal subject because it resists conclusion. The conversation about it can go on indefinitely because it leads nowhere, and it is a pleasure to immerse oneself freely and aimlessly in the speech. It’s not about conclusions, by the way, it’s about a sense of reality. Its boundaries in our case are secured by the work, which stands as it stood, whatever one may say. In this sense, the thing I see is more meaningful than the word, although its meaning does not involve any content. Quite the opposite, with a radical lack of content, which in the vernacular is called depth. When someone invokes depth, there is actually nothing more to say. This is more or less how art discourse develops: as free-style chatter that targets an area outside of speech and is therefore always missed. Consequently, each participant must find his or her own place in it.I once read somewhere that an artist is someone who is so committed to art that they cannot live without it. They create because they have to, which could be called a mission, but just as well an intrusive or unconditional reflex; and that sounds so self-serving. In order to remain independent, the artist must therefore be unique. It is said that a free man does not have to do anything, but such freedom is simply freedom of movement. A vacuum that sooner or later turns into boredom. This is definitely not enough if we want to be alive, because life has the traits of radicalism. Perhaps the most radical choice is precisely the one that cannot be justified, an assault on the instance of sense and common sense. Which is wonderfully in keeping with the condition of the artist, who works in the dark anyway.
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Weronika Wronecka
text for the Plain field exhibition, made in cooperation with Krzysztof Mętel and Mateusz Piestrak in March 2022 at Pani Domu gallery in Poznań
I like browsing through books. I collect illustrations from them and use them in my paintings. In this way, illustrative motifs can wander – from a sheet of paper, where perception takes place in in the same amount of time it takes to turn a page – onto the canvas that functions in the architectural space, stuck to the wall, in a state of eternal openness to being perceived. What is small becomes big. The north meets the south – in the Middle Ages, books were illuminated in northern Europe because the climate was not conducive to wall painting, which, in turn, flourished in the countries of the Mediterranean basin. In the north, paintings were closed in leather-bound volumes, while in the south, they were integrated with buildings and the space inside them in the form of frescoes. There were two different types of painting, different types of perception, conditioned by latitude and depending on the landscape, sunlight and diet – everything that made up the neurobiological structure of the creators of culture who, after all, inhabited their bodies, always unequally privileged in accordance with the nature of this world.
I would not like to inhabit books. This is why I extract illustrations from them and try to integrate them, enlarged, with my surroundings. I mean, I would literally not want to live in a leather-bound volume but I would also not like to live in a fictional, literary world. Fiction is there to complement reality, not to produce it. And the one who illustrates must submit to history, reality and the sociocultural context. Artists, like gypsies, move with their historical and cultural fleet across the field, the shape and fate of which they cannot decide. In the end, they are assigned – like criminals – those who are called curators to cooperate with them.
On my canvases, a negotiation is going on: whether to present or to illustrate; whether to tell a story; whether to be tasty or raw; whether to brag; whether to point a finger; whether to laugh; whether to be serious; whether to do a lot or a little; whether to be cynical or kind? What is this language? What is the difference, as Francis Bacon asked, between a painting projecting a problem directly onto the recipient’s nervous system and the one that also communicates something, but follows a roundabout way of illustration? How is it possible for us to see something and understand the meaning of it? What is it like with perception – do we see the world as if we are staring out of a window? Or perhaps the world just obscures what is essential and true, as Giacometti suggested with his sculpture Pointe à l’oeil (Spike in the Eye)? It is a question about the vector of vision, the direction of our being – do we push or withdraw, and how does the world relate to it?
Ultimately, it is always about producing affect. To take care of a painting = to transfer it to oneself. Another nice metaphor. And painting? It is probably there to (unfortunately) expose oneself to being seen, and (worse) under the guise of modesty. Crafting things – anything you like to watch, listen to, wear, and so on, is an option. It is there for more than existence to happen; it is there for something extra to happen. So, you may make things, and you may not, and it seems impossible to figure out which is better. So, we choose between existing and existing with a tiny plus (which can be, for example, painting a picture on canvas).
Creating is not necessarily the same as living your life. When I create, I do not experience, but I rummage in the foundations of what I have already experienced. Always squeezed between action and meaning, I work to produce this existential surplus of mine, looking for an unattainable, as it seems to me, compromise, which is a nice place between creation and life. Where is it, if not at work? It can be said that paintings are like projections on curtains, or that they stare at us, or that they have a presence, or that they prevent us from seeing something, or that they make it possible to perceive something. For me, paintings are an excuse to do a job that gives me hope that someday I will find out how I should live.
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Alicja Kubicka
I like browsing through books. I collect illustrations from them and use them in my paintings. In this way, illustrative motifs can wander – from a sheet of paper, where perception takes place in in the same amount of time it takes to turn a page – onto the canvas that functions in the architectural space, stuck to the wall, in a state of eternal openness to being perceived. What is small becomes big. The north meets the south – in the Middle Ages, books were illuminated in northern Europe because the climate was not conducive to wall painting, which, in turn, flourished in the countries of the Mediterranean basin. In the north, paintings were closed in leather-bound volumes, while in the south, they were integrated with buildings and the space inside them in the form of frescoes. There were two different types of painting, different types of perception, conditioned by latitude and depending on the landscape, sunlight and diet – everything that made up the neurobiological structure of the creators of culture who, after all, inhabited their bodies, always unequally privileged in accordance with the nature of this world.
I would not like to inhabit books. This is why I extract illustrations from them and try to integrate them, enlarged, with my surroundings. I mean, I would literally not want to live in a leather-bound volume but I would also not like to live in a fictional, literary world. Fiction is there to complement reality, not to produce it. And the one who illustrates must submit to history, reality and the sociocultural context. Artists, like gypsies, move with their historical and cultural fleet across the field, the shape and fate of which they cannot decide. In the end, they are assigned – like criminals – those who are called curators to cooperate with them.
On my canvases, a negotiation is going on: whether to present or to illustrate; whether to tell a story; whether to be tasty or raw; whether to brag; whether to point a finger; whether to laugh; whether to be serious; whether to do a lot or a little; whether to be cynical or kind? What is this language? What is the difference, as Francis Bacon asked, between a painting projecting a problem directly onto the recipient’s nervous system and the one that also communicates something, but follows a roundabout way of illustration? How is it possible for us to see something and understand the meaning of it? What is it like with perception – do we see the world as if we are staring out of a window? Or perhaps the world just obscures what is essential and true, as Giacometti suggested with his sculpture Pointe à l’oeil (Spike in the Eye)? It is a question about the vector of vision, the direction of our being – do we push or withdraw, and how does the world relate to it?
Ultimately, it is always about producing affect. To take care of a painting = to transfer it to oneself. Another nice metaphor. And painting? It is probably there to (unfortunately) expose oneself to being seen, and (worse) under the guise of modesty. Crafting things – anything you like to watch, listen to, wear, and so on, is an option. It is there for more than existence to happen; it is there for something extra to happen. So, you may make things, and you may not, and it seems impossible to figure out which is better. So, we choose between existing and existing with a tiny plus (which can be, for example, painting a picture on canvas).
Creating is not necessarily the same as living your life. When I create, I do not experience, but I rummage in the foundations of what I have already experienced. Always squeezed between action and meaning, I work to produce this existential surplus of mine, looking for an unattainable, as it seems to me, compromise, which is a nice place between creation and life. Where is it, if not at work? It can be said that paintings are like projections on curtains, or that they stare at us, or that they have a presence, or that they prevent us from seeing something, or that they make it possible to perceive something. For me, paintings are an excuse to do a job that gives me hope that someday I will find out how I should live.
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Alicja Kubicka
from the catalogue for the Painter's toolkit exhibition, which took place at Municipal Gallery bwa in Bydgoszcz in May 2018
Perceptions.
Our body has such a structure that when we look back, we immediately lose sight of the direction and point we are heading towards. Although it disappears (the beginning of the end) from the field of vision, its afterimage remains and overlaps with the memories that shape our memory.
The process of forgetting would therefore be a simultaneous loss of the past and the future, as well as a temporary selection of what is important and what is not.
Living and looking back, seeing the past determines - together with our eyes - the direction of the face, and thus the taste, smells, touch...
The kind of post-modern game of "feeling in reverse" in Alicja Kubicka's works combines the past "time of looking" with the reworked and conscious "time of seeing". It is yet another look at what already happened - and what, in relation to the reacting and feeling body, is in a continuum of "lasting time", as being involved in what is "behind".
Therefore, an important but not the only direction of her search is to reveal the consequences of the dominance of the sense of sight in the history of culture, as well as of the important relationships between visual experience and its content.
By creating, she addresses the problem of self-thematism - in constant deconstruction and reconstruction of modern and post-modern visual tradition.
In her work, what we look at is what Alicja sees and what Others have already experienced before. Also the issues of the medium and self-referentiality, combined with Julia Kristeva's intertextuality, presented by her, allows us, the viewers, to see the reality belonging to the Other, trying to see it through its eyes. By opening up to dialogue in this way, Alicja's imagination re-reads and revives what remains and is important. The disillusioning treatments she used reveal the fictious character of the world se had seen and depicted earlier. In this situation, the image becomes a kind of a game of conventions and does not refer mimetically to reality, but essentially to its image.
Our body has such a structure that when we look back, we immediately lose sight of the direction and point we are heading towards. Although it disappears (the beginning of the end) from the field of vision, its afterimage remains and overlaps with the memories that shape our memory.
The process of forgetting would therefore be a simultaneous loss of the past and the future, as well as a temporary selection of what is important and what is not.
Living and looking back, seeing the past determines - together with our eyes - the direction of the face, and thus the taste, smells, touch...
The kind of post-modern game of "feeling in reverse" in Alicja Kubicka's works combines the past "time of looking" with the reworked and conscious "time of seeing". It is yet another look at what already happened - and what, in relation to the reacting and feeling body, is in a continuum of "lasting time", as being involved in what is "behind".
Therefore, an important but not the only direction of her search is to reveal the consequences of the dominance of the sense of sight in the history of culture, as well as of the important relationships between visual experience and its content.
By creating, she addresses the problem of self-thematism - in constant deconstruction and reconstruction of modern and post-modern visual tradition.
In her work, what we look at is what Alicja sees and what Others have already experienced before. Also the issues of the medium and self-referentiality, combined with Julia Kristeva's intertextuality, presented by her, allows us, the viewers, to see the reality belonging to the Other, trying to see it through its eyes. By opening up to dialogue in this way, Alicja's imagination re-reads and revives what remains and is important. The disillusioning treatments she used reveal the fictious character of the world se had seen and depicted earlier. In this situation, the image becomes a kind of a game of conventions and does not refer mimetically to reality, but essentially to its image.
A frame from Michelangelo Antonioni's film Blowup, USA, Great Britain, Italy, 1966.
Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, Death Seminar B, 2005 http://withreferencetodeath.philippocock.net/blog/rasdjarmrearnsook-araya-reading-corpses-to-female-corpses-2005/
2. Knots
In Alicja's work, "staring" emanates melancholy. It is only somewhere on the borders of recognition that the structure of a painting reconciles the "physical" with the imagined. The action of going "beyond" - into the unknown - is also the work on the real - so that imagination, by transforming matter, would change its earlier meanings.
By tying time and materialised fiction together, the artist woven the image of the viewer that breathes life into a painting into an excess that arises. She confronts it with a number of experiences reacting to thickenings resulting from the places of "bonds". From exaggerations built by re-trying to combine what has been broken. That which does not remain in the communication of message and understanding, including consent - resistance to power, which, in spite of the rules of life, is realised at the expense of others and their small chances of survival.
So what are these knotted thickenings, cracks and interruptions - that which is empty... in reality, they only seem to be the paint and substrate applied, but for Alicja, they are the "phisicality of the inexpressible". The materiality associated with the memory of images, as well as with the recognised places of events that one can say they exist because they do not exist.
This is similarly reflected in a work by Jeff Koons, Play-Doh. Looking at the installation, we can only see the huge shape of the shapeless, expressive pieces of coloured plastic. Trying to recognise the content in the shape, we go back to our childhood with our memory. To the period of contact with the surface of the space as if it were a plastic mass to play with. Now, having a different body, we realise that in the process of recognition we also discover ourselves, being as inalienable part of the gigantic form.
So Alicja, getting to know the "other side of the mirror", is determined to face the "image" as an area of politics, privacy... of personal dillemas, as well as human dramas. She still is like a child, amazed by the world - as well as m i x e d with it.
In Alicja's work, "staring" emanates melancholy. It is only somewhere on the borders of recognition that the structure of a painting reconciles the "physical" with the imagined. The action of going "beyond" - into the unknown - is also the work on the real - so that imagination, by transforming matter, would change its earlier meanings.
By tying time and materialised fiction together, the artist woven the image of the viewer that breathes life into a painting into an excess that arises. She confronts it with a number of experiences reacting to thickenings resulting from the places of "bonds". From exaggerations built by re-trying to combine what has been broken. That which does not remain in the communication of message and understanding, including consent - resistance to power, which, in spite of the rules of life, is realised at the expense of others and their small chances of survival.
So what are these knotted thickenings, cracks and interruptions - that which is empty... in reality, they only seem to be the paint and substrate applied, but for Alicja, they are the "phisicality of the inexpressible". The materiality associated with the memory of images, as well as with the recognised places of events that one can say they exist because they do not exist.
This is similarly reflected in a work by Jeff Koons, Play-Doh. Looking at the installation, we can only see the huge shape of the shapeless, expressive pieces of coloured plastic. Trying to recognise the content in the shape, we go back to our childhood with our memory. To the period of contact with the surface of the space as if it were a plastic mass to play with. Now, having a different body, we realise that in the process of recognition we also discover ourselves, being as inalienable part of the gigantic form.
So Alicja, getting to know the "other side of the mirror", is determined to face the "image" as an area of politics, privacy... of personal dillemas, as well as human dramas. She still is like a child, amazed by the world - as well as m i x e d with it.
Jeff Koons, Play-Doh installation, polychrome aluminium 312,4 x 383,5 x 348 cm, 5 unique versions, 1994-2014, Newport Street Gallery, London, photo by Sławomir Lipncki, 2016
Catalogue, framed reproductions of the artist's paintings, site-specific installation, Colony of Artists in Gdańsk (appendix to the diploma), photo by Alicja Kubicka, 2017
Catalogue, framed reproductions of the artist's paintings, site-specific installation, Colony of Artists in Gdańsk (appendix to the diploma), photo by Alicja Kubicka, 2017
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dr hab. Sławomir Lipnicki
dr hab. Sławomir Lipnicki
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