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Jean-Luc Chalumeau |
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Gérard Xuriguera |
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Boguslaw Mansfeld |
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Marie-Jo Gacek |
Grazyna Tarkowska
The eyes. They dominate the works of Grazyna Tarkowska. Generally huge (Self-portrait – Nothing more, 2007; Innocent, 2005…), sometimes multiplied (Childhood Memory, 2001), these aquamarine or dark eyes do not only question the viewer but also introduce him to a strange, difficult world. This world is more the aesthetic depth than the person artist’s history. Before the works of Tarkowska, we are surprised. Indeed, without scandal, without violence except that the sharp graphics streaking most works, to a form of lyrical abstraction (but whose title can lead us back to the problems of the eyes: The wind in the eyes, 2008), these works affect us and convert us to the aesthetic attitude by the quiet need with which they imposed on us, and it seems that the surprise has been felt that first time, required to serve our perception and lead to disinterestedness without which we cannot enjoy them fully.
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Grazyna Tarkowska’s work
clearly confirms the intuition of Husserl: aesthetic
astonishment only causes thinking for dismiss it, because this
painting (for instance the moving My 15, 2007) do not ask me to
be “understood”, but to be felt as deeply as an unimpeachable
witness. I don’t have to try to tame it by giving explanations
to get it into the scope of my habits: it is and will keep being
new in my eyes. Its strangeness only invites me to better
perceive it for itself, it never disappears because the strange,
in aesthetic, is an aspect of depth. I understand, before this
surprised look (Absence, 2007) or sadly concentrated (Reflexion,
2005) that the strangeness does not have to be explained by the
hidden: these faces are not confessions, but art works, and the
aesthetic object hides nothing. These works are there, their
“sense” is wholly present, and if there’s a mystery, it’s a
mystery in full light.
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there is also
difficult, in what we can see another aspect of his depth.
Naturally, the identification and rational understanding of the
subject are not the end of the aesthetic perception. I would be
too simple! Before this frightened face for example, there is no
problem to "read" a sense of first-degree image, especially
since the artist helps us by her title (Dark shelter, 2007).
Although it talks of darkness in this painting, there is no
darkness for the feeling that approaches the subject expressed:
I am before all art like before the music where the expression
replaces the representation. The works of Grazyna Tarkowska are
somehow delegates of her subjectivity, they are much more than
the product of an activity: as an expression of her being, they
can only be difficult to achieve.
Before the look (initially surprised) of the viewer, the aesthetic object proposed by Tarkowska asserts itself as object (and of course, the amateur is free to retain it as “beautiful object”), but rather, he is the source of a world, and we will lose much if we fail to enter. |
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That is the challenge launched by the artist: we must begin by observing the formal qualities (this gifted colorist is able to invent new forms about topics most often treated in the history of painting, Pieta of 2008 for example) and, secondly, leave the body of the work to reach its soul. But this soul may escape us, because it appears to us only by the matter and meaning of the aesthetic object. That’s why the path to which the approach of Grazyna Tarkowska invites us is difficult: we must oscillate between trial and feeling. The aesthetic object that she gives us truly throws us a call, asking both our thinking, because it is coherent and independent enough to claim objective knowledge, and our sense, because it does not leave exhausted by this knowledge, and causes a more intimate, indefinable relationship, which is the mystery of creation. That is why every picture of Grazyna Tarkowska must be viewed long.
Jean-Luc Chalumeau april 2008
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