| "Between Shadow and Cloud" watercolours, graphics and ex-librises of Gosia Seweryn soloexhibition in "Warszawska Galeria Ekslibrisu" in Warsaw in 2006 |
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The question about land, route, and signpost - is with us discreetly along the whole way during the trip through Seweryn's art world. We meet within this world the known and the unknown visions, obvious but completely mysterious visions. When staying with the artwork a little longer you can see how the deserts, the courtyards and spaces are filled with the new colour and contrast and till now the missing motives and images are appearing. The artist uses the same aesthetics, her style resists madness of times. The art is in this way a kind of safe haven - a place, where you can allow yourself to go into "the empty time" existing concomitantly with the reality. Stability is not in that case tantamount to inertness. We get gradually, once a while a new signal. People's figures and faces have not appeared recently, but now they are coming into this world introducing the surprising meanings: the analysis of feelings, the courage in perception of them - and the mature reflection on them. Nature, architecture, fantastically rotating objects used to play the main role - now we get the space wrapped up in the secret curtain, and the wings half-real. The auto-reflection on the longing for freedom in the eye of the agreement for life. Because of that the cycle of screen-prints "Summer stories" is mostly connected with the Author's works created before the year 2001. The willing of hiding the face out of the painting's border is still present. Still people appear hardly fragmentarily - in the funny way they are marked as the symbolic vision on the empty beach. "The human material" is treated similarly to the one in "Erotic notes" - here the small parts of the body in geometrical stylistics are trembling in the funny way in their meanings. For sure not literally - and for sure not directly. And finally the breakthrough occurs: The Artist applies modifications into previously started cycle "Stories in Clouds", which seem to make the viewer look at the initial work from a little perspective. Before it, Stories were about the world of moving and fantastical blocks spinning in the undefined space. The structures were crashing on the very small planets, they were interlacing the serpentines gently flowing through arcades. You could have seen not only the lack of inner harmony and logic, but also the need for creating absolutely free world, where the tired soul can find its shelter from orders, rules and rationality. The Author with geometrical patina covers this free world: putting the square layers on it. Some of them bring the new quality and sepia-like style, others blur the shapes with fog. But they are always square. So it appears that the need for arrangement, looking for the rule is in that artistic creativity so strong that it even surrounds the unreal world. That is how the lithography cycle "Flight offs" was created. Recently created watercolours are speaking in quite a different language. Through ajar, transparent curtains, the expressive faces or contours are visible. The cycle is also called "From Behind the curtains". Some of those faces are sad, others - lost in thoughts, but also there are some happy faces, but all of them are longing and waiting. The figures are climbing up, but you can clearly see, that they will never fly away, because their wings exist in order to remind of impossibility of their usage. They are just sad items, everlasting failures. Being expressed in various shapes - just how various is the failure dimension - bended blades, lengthen feathers, bands moving on the wind, morphing with the shape of hands. Marcel Proust's novel seems to be familiar: for Swann the most beautiful is the expectation, because the fulfilment destroys the need, and that also destroys the dream and flutter - the emptiness is creeping into a life. The essential visualisations move into that poetic picture of nostalgia for the good, even in the reference to pop-culture form. On the angels' faces the line is present directly from the comic illustrations, their eyes looking with the large expressive apples of the eye. The pumpkin of Halloween can be seen, and the pointed ear from the film realization of Tolkien's work. And everything is in "Seweryn Art" - the Artist shows in this way that she agrees for the presence of pop-culture in the world, she perceives it. However, she knows that it is not almighty and it is not able to dominate the artistic "ego". Apart from the watercolour and graphic in different variations, ex-libris always remains the important part of Seweryn's creativity. In her poetry it is a symbol, a synthesis expressing the connection between a book and an owner. But the Artist gently twines both the parts and processes them giving them the unique, characteristic shape. The enriched painting appears by the interesting game of a book motive, a bird, and a moon among the smooth lines connecting everything in the crucial fact. What is that creativity? Consequent registration of seeing the people's world, dreams, and art? A difficult journey from freedom to conscious agreement for limits? An expression of aesthetical consciousness? For certain partly all of it.
Mariola Konieczna
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