Surrounded by Images, Immersed in Colour

Aleksandra Pawliszyn

Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk

Surrounded by Images, Immersed in Colour.
On the Paintings of Aleksandra Jadczuk

Motif of Play

The motif of play, which is so important in Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics, seems to aptly capture the painterly talent hidden in the depths of the artist’s personality. In her works a cosmic ocean of shimmering colours flows passionately and sometimes markedly exposes gold, which whispers here in a hidden discussion with the world, exhorting the evocation of colours and breaking through the veil of the visible to become an expression of the invisible depth–the archetypal ocean of primary colours. The gesture of the hand-guided brush enables the eruption of the kaleidoscope of attempts to encompass and express the invisible core of the visible, interrupting the monotony of descriptive painterly narratives with a line of abstraction. It reaches the archetypal origins…

            We must remember that the analysis of the above-mentioned motif of play reveals that the play is characterized by a specific way of being. On the one hand it appears that we cannot perceive the play from the perspective of the playing subject—on the other, the play’s special way of being entails that it exists only when it is played.

The status of a work of art, as described by contemporary philosophical hermeneutics, is grounded in this theme of play, which finds its best example in a musical work–it can only exist when it is played. The same applies to any work of art, wherein the truth takes shape, regardless of the material medium, whether it is [t]he stony is in the work of architecture, the wooden in the woodcarving, the colored in the painting (M. Heidegger, The Origins of the Work of Art). In case of Aleksandra Jadczuk’s art, we are dealing with the colored in the painting…

These interacting fragments, put together just like a jigsaw puzzle, resounding with the aimless play of existence (Gadamer’s back-and-forth), a never-ending game, even though it is signed at the bottom by the author, who wanders, after all, into the future, where death lurks… Each piece of this jigsaw puzzle is a whole in itself, but the artist’s play emanates with constellations of ever-changing meanings; they are like the milky way of our night sky, saturated with earthly colours, though.

A window. Smaller windows in a bigger one. A clear plane of a play of windows, which form some kind of wholes here: fields and rivers, lush green fields and a river current that is always hungry for movement, at night, before dawn…

Then there is the warmth of the heated earth and the soaring cliffs of the graphite mountains, which are lined with water veins. Sometimes, there appears rime on the trees of life as a consequence of this sequence, and it gives place to a white window that seems to be inviting us to renew the existence or to create the world anew, perhaps…?

The window frames are subject to the play of what is dark and interwoven with lines of words uttered and codified in a book that feeds the proto-ocean of energy, where the roots of the trees draw their water from; the indifference of the seeming suns, and that of the constituents of the regular contours of the fabric of existence.

Also, there begins the play that transcends the frame of the window – a play of shape and colour that feeds the multiplied power of regular forms, injecting the threads of life there – the emotions of the desert margins of being…

We can also encounter a play that makes its way via violet and resembles a kind of epiphany of life and death, with a skylight in the ceiling so that the soul can escape into the boundless vastness of the universe…

Fabric of Corporeality

We should note here that the theme of play will be present in the works of Aleksandra Jadczuk at every level of her creative struggle with the painterly ‘matter’ of painting under the shield of colour. Its expression could be linked to the statements of the author of the contemporary ontology of corporeality, M. Merleau-Ponty, who in his last and unfinished work The Visible and the Invisible proposes a new notion of the human world in relation to the classical one represented by Descartes, emphasising the sensual-corporeal ground of the world experienced by humans, padded, as it were, with a lining of corporeal fabric, emanating both tangible and sensually perceptible colours. In contrast to his French predecessor, who entered the European philosophical-intellectual tradition with the statement: cogito ergo sum, Merleau-Ponty observes that every thinking we are aware of happens to the body, and therefore, it is the dispersed corporeality that constitutes a kind of environment in which human existence should look for its milieu.                           
            Corporeality and sensuality – including colour – should escape the merely rational consideration of the human world and reveal its appearance shaped by touch, visibility, sounds, maybe scent…       
            In Aleksandra’s paintings corporeality takes shape the droplets of colour that fill the porous horizon of our human world. This corporeality is created with a painterly gesture, installing the golden source of light on a condensed dew of colour. Such a landscape of shined-through corporeality allows us to describe colour as ‘that which gives measure to things’, with the reference to Marleau-Ponty’s ontology of corporeality.
            We can also come across a kind of burn that ruptures the same, inviting transgression beyond the established, expressionless everyday: a non-figurative narrative – a fiction that derealizes the horizontal world of things in order to pinpoint the ephemeral essence of existence.
            The atoms of meaning in a desert disarray. Paths of facing destiny, a destiny which is still a path. We encounter here a colourful network of shapes networked by peculiar nerves and saturated by bloodstream of colours, sometimes caught in an orderly pattern, but then interrupted by a red circle of the sun?

The Archetypal Nature of the Fabric of Corporeality

Inspired by one of the working notes of the author of The Visible and the Invisible, I made use of the methodological vehicle of the metaphor “as” and interpreted the fabric of corporeality as an archetype of corporeality. On the one hand, we have Merleau-Ponty’s intention to reach for the inexhaustible, vertical Wild Being which generates all representations; on the other hand, there is the archetype in C. G. Jung’s terms, which the founder of depth psychology compares to the axial system of a crystal, emphasising the non-figurative character of this archetype. The fabric of corporeality would be an expression of the Wild Being, which is a kind of proto image of the visible and tangible reality, whose horizontal colours the French philosopher calls “the alleged ones”, simultaneously indicating that coloured things are a kind of short-lived and subtle shading with colour, resonating with this Wild Being, which radiates, as it were, a transient crystallisation of the visible, coloured things.
            The content of the artist’s paintings seems to determine the vertical dimension of the Wild Being, which assumes the archetype of the fabric of corporeality and is sometimes represented by regular drawings of fragments. The author builds the kaleidoscope of colours and shapes, which is then played out by the viewers as the movement of molecules of the archetypal crystal, at times blossoming with a feast of colours, at others hiding behind a thicket of sunlight nets.
            The artist’s hand tears into space-time continuum like a comet, breaking the invisible, archetypal network of the ocean of the proto energy of existence, and it offers geometric shapes clustered like molecules around the axis of the archetypal crystal. The logic of the truth that is about to happen, sometimes at odds with the logic of the argument, abounds with empty spaces inviting us to inhabit and to propose our own constellations of existence.
            The constellation established in the play of regular parts reveals itself as the axis of an archetypal crystal, generating a tapestry of colours from a visible, albeit still non-figurative world. The geometric pattern of the key as a kind of axis may symbolise the heart of darkness of the Wild Being, which flows with festoons of colours into being tamed by visible light.

The Crystal of the Archetype versus the Crystal of the Work

Let us now focus on the interpretation of the metaphor of crystal, which Gadamer uses to convey the peculiarity of contemporary painting. This is also true for Jung, who, as we mentioned earlier, tries to illustrate the essence of the archetype. What seems to be of special interest to us is Jung’s argument quoted by Jolanda Jacobi, where he compares the form of archetypes with the axial system of a preforming crystal, which comes into existence through the way ions and then molecules cluster together. The atoms and their molecules form a crystal in a saturated fluid and its axial system has a form that is neither concrete nor complete.
            Gadamer, in turn, uses the metaphor of crystal to demonstrate the peculiarity of contemporary abstraction. He emphasizes the role of the main centre, which is present but not directly perceptible, yet it is an essential, geometrical, and extremely hard structure, just as in a crystal which stores time in its concavities, extrafoliations, or granulated ruins of weathering. Highlighting its non-figurative ‘matter’, Gadamer considers the crystal to be a symbol of the order captured in the image: piercing through the unperceived but not yet ready to take shape, embracing some boundaries of light, neither abstract nor concrete, neither an object nor a non-object.
            The axis of the crystal is revealed here as an amorphous arrangement of what emerges – a hard, shining geometry that sets the dynamis of existence in motion – a kind of unconscious “amniotic fluid” of human experience, which the crystal of the artwork draws from its representations of images that crystallize around the its centre. We should repeat here: a signifying entity and a symbol of order, which makes it neither abstract nor concrete.
            Her paintings seem to be breathing in the tissue of colour, bones, nails, hair, and the visible does not end with what is in sight. The view crowns the invisible, which hides behind the ostensibly visible, and their breath resounds, lined with the invisible idea and with the music of the language of colour, creating a unique Word of colour. What we are dealing with here is a kind of axial magnetism of colour set against the play of shapes.
            We can also observe here a peculiar dialectic of colours: yellow, sometimes red and blue, as if they stood for the clashing powers of warmth and cold, which every visible world can emerge from. And in the background, there is a kind of pulsating fog of existence that would like to experience lips and eyes, as Bolesław wrote…

“The Modern Artist Discovers the Unseen”.

In one of the documenting photographs, we can see: some armchairs, a table, like in the magical house Hanna once sang about, where anything can happen, with paintings on the walls and stories busy with conjuring themselves up, or this nut that is cracking itself… The walls have been covered with signals of regular abstraction, condensing into a shyly figurative message, which makes it warm and welcoming, so that it becomes worthwhile for a weary visitor to necessarily take a look here sometimes….
            Her compositions are like a chess game of metaphysical minima of existence, set apart for the here and now, tearing up the bright background of habitable spaces. The minima do convey some subtle figurativeness, lending an unusual aura to the message offered to the viewer.
            The golden corporeality of light is an image of an expanding secret depth, perhaps the depth of the universe – the realm of the stars. Would not the Pythagorean music be a mysterious embroidery of the cosmos, yearning to resound in each particular contour of golden light? Would not each departing shadow, then, be the porous horizon of what already ceases to be? Where to find the boundary between colour and shadow when they mutually presuppose each other?
            Let us follow P. Klee’s statement cited by Gadamer: the [m]odern artist discovers the unseen, something that cannot be seen, but, nevertheless, in a way chooses the artist to take on some visible form through his talent. It seems, therefore, as if the modern artist was governed by something that exceeds him, something like the Heraclitean Logos that in a way sanctifies him as a seeker, choosing him to become an expression of a non-spatial, timeless – and, therefore, also non-human – eternity, so that the eternity can, in the finite, mortal human being, become real….
            Thus, the “amniotic liquid” constituted by the experiences of the human race would be for the artist a type of the unperceived and non-existent until, through his work, it would enter the sphere of concretisation and emerge from the dark depths of the unconscious, forming the sediment of a content-rich form – a work created, in which, the modern artist reveals the unperceived, allowing him to achieve its individual existence.
            It is in the work of art, therefore, that the archetype would obtain a public language peculiar to itself, so strangely close to all people, regardless of their position in society; and the work of art – not only a painterly one – would crystallize time in the material medium at the creator’s disposal, thus becoming an embodiment of the archetypal unconscious.
            We encounter a series of works that can be seen as an attempt to convey the metaphor of the crystal in a corporeal way: a play of regular squares, or rectangular columns, taking on a sometimes rhomboidal, sometimes trapezoidal, or conical form. The painter unfolds before us a movement of crystal structures in which the arrangements of various geometric fragments suggest the wealth of figurative shapes that can emerge from it.
            An orderly internal structure, distributing molecules, ions, atoms in the nodes of an ordered network unfolding before us, at times preserving the symmetry of the annexed space, walls, edges and corners, and at other times slightly disrupting this symmetry, in order to lead the viewer on the path of his own creative interpretation of the proposed prelude to creation. The networks of crystals are therefore not perfect, which seems to be the artist’s intention to draw the viewer into the process of creating various dimensions of symmetry through an irregular mosaic of geometric shapes, sometimes shaded with figurative possibility.

The Archetypal Journey that the Work of Art Takes Us On

The game of archetypal journey that a work of art takes us on sometimes results in a kind of mysterious transformation, when the end of some state of existence triggers an unsettling tension, as if the frozen time was announcing the next state of existence. With the hypothesis that art is a game with the unconscious, we anticipate strolling through a forest of fictional narratives, both of the creator and of the viewer, reflecting the invisible pulse of a vertical, profound, non-narrative, archetypal reality.
            It can be assumed that the mysterious game in which the viewer is drawn into the work is meant to lead them on a path closely linked to the mystery of rebirth – a transformation taking place when the horizontal dimension of life is expanded by the timeless, vertical perspective of the divine, which is preserved in the crystal of the work, as if alchemically transforming the everyday into a celebration of the time of the gods.
            We encounter a series of canvases in which gold reigns supreme, an element that was treated by the ancient cultures as the body of the gods. One canvas depicts an ocean of primordial colours emerging from behind a veil of golden blizzard, with an undefined land, or rather a fascinating play of colours and outlines of shapes. One would like to enter it and take a barge across this primordial ocean of existence in order to reach the land that is barely visible here.
            The painter’s brush opens before us a range of possibilities for participating in a stroll through a kind of poetic fiction of time and space, before they even appear. We see the almost tangible, frosted landscapes of gold with the outline of competing blue and red suns, which seem to be trying to break through the sparkling pendants, ragged cobwebs… – (Bolesław’s neologism).
            And then again there is an inviting golden texture to touch, which is punctuated by a white comet with a green tail, and the celadon green leaks out of the frame.
            A forest of unfinished trees appears further on, followed by the signal of a red disc below, as if emblematic of a world to be inhabited.
            Then, a pane of glass with the dense bluish and pink markings, as if it was affected by the breath of a cobweb depicted on the canvas besides – a silver web which the encroaching light shines through.
            And one of the paintings has just such a feature related to the landscape with the golden oriole: here the light rustles and the colours conspire into a tale: blue, pink, gold, silver, with a pale yellow orb smiling from behind.

The Artist’s Painterly Alphabet

We should note that the language, which the author of the The Visible and the Invisible calls a less heavy corporeality (or more subtle than the central category of the ontology of corporeality he proposes: the fabric of corporeality), would maintain meaning thanks to its own order when, for example, something in a work of art would be said in a strong sense; however, it is undeniable that the French philosopher emphasises the delicate, non-massive character of this linguistic corporeal fabric that only subtle elements can reach, leaving the heavy corporeality aside.
            Then, this sphere of subtle corporeality, which Merleau-Ponty calls language, could be looked at through the prism of the set of letters selected by the artist from the language he uses (P. Ricoeur) – her material, or rather, her corporeal alphabet.
            In conclusion, it should be stated that in case of Aleksandra Jadczuk’s work, we are dealing with a set of letters of her original painterly language, established in the form of a peculiar alphabet – a set of corporeal minimal signs, which clearly emphasises the uniqueness of the subtle corporeality of her painterly language’s fabric. It absorbs the emissions of the particles of the painterly language in general, increasing the intensity of the differences between the colours so as to free them to shine in the revealed rays of sunlight and to deepen the grasp of the invisible, archetypal lining of visible things….