In my work, I use objects and situations I have found over the last 6-7 years to create story-screening surfaces. The chosen, invited “characters” are now, in their new situation, components of a different reality than they were before. My basic experience is the almost constant perception of the past, present and future sliding into each other in our present world. 20-30 years ago they were more separated…
The rearranged stories in my paintings are completely independent of specific times or spatial situations, yet the new relationships between the elements that make up the images build a highly authentic surface of reality.
I can also conceive of my existence as a continuous observation, the direction and intensity of which I choose at will. A system of released and controlled moments selects the found and retrieved visual elements and weaves them together into a new story, in which, despite the fact that we all have different memory systems, each of us – I hope – can discover our own stories and realities. For me, it is always the idea that I want to realise that is important, and sometimes I use the tools of traditional painting because I find them the most suitable, but in other cases, materials and processes that are very different from these appear on the surfaces of my works. In recent years, I have been working in parallel with my collage series based on ink gesture surfaces and my stitching systems sewn from old hand-woven textile pieces and then appearing on the surfaces of the paintings.
I have called my textile-based paintings Archaic – stretched – soft – concrete paintings. I have not used any dyeing materials to create the surfaces of the images, I have constructed the images from the original colours of the canvas. The materials used for the works were exclusively old linen and hemp bags and other hand-woven pieces of textiles (damaged, in fact waste textiles) that accompanied and served the people in their work, and were therefore not decorated at all. The pieces of textile were sewn – assembled into tableaux.
The hemp stitches that appear on the surfaces are “interlaced” in groups, walking on the texture. The “movement” of life, its fate, is somehow imprinted in these textiles, the resulting works are a kind of memorial to the people who have used them over the past almost a hundred years, perhaps no longer alive. The pieces in the series also raise the question of the transformation of our relationship to objects and their repair, the relativity and interchangeability of notions of valuable and worthless.
While making the works, I was also interested in the extent to which the function and position of a given object can be transformed. For example, flour sacks “cross over” from being purely functional objects to the opposite side, losing their functionality and becoming puritanical artifacts. They can be classified as geometrical art, concrete art, but they are also the opposite of this, since the straight lines are soft and curved. The surface of the paintings is puritanical, nothing is concealed, confessed, clearly shown, revealed, straightforward, in an honest sense.
During the loss of function, old stains and textile damage were transformed into signs communicating with each other and with hemp stitches.
Our everyday experience is the constant shaking of authenticity and reality around us, a process I try to counteract with my work.