Paulina Hebda - ,,Fairy Tale"
30.03.12 - 21.04.12, opening: 30.03. at 6 p.m.
FF Gallery - Traugutta 18, ?ód?
An extremely positive feature of Hebda’s most recent works from the series called Bajka [Fairy Tale] – created for her final exam at the Film School in ?ód?, under the supervision of professor Grzegorz Przyborek – is the skillful use of form that rather refers to the rationalization of seeing and to the complicated world of emotions, expressed by static, sculpturesque takes, full of references to the tradition of old art, but also to painting as a genre and to a lesser extent, to surrealistic photography.
Accessories that Hebda uses are simple, not to say ascetic. They paint life in its potentiality, including one’s life prospects. The purposeful use of a pink and – less frequently – white background is part of the plan to show this potential “theatre of life”. Tadeusz Kantor believed that the suggestive use of pink in Witold Wojtkiewicz’s painting Ob??d [Madness] came from a dream of the mentally disturbed artist. Did Kantor exaggerate with this interpretation? Certainly not in Wojtkiewicz’s case, but in Hebda’s works the use of suggestive colour is not so expressive, although the pessimism of her staged situations is very clear.
The symbolism of black and white and of masking one’s face is equally important, as well as by deliberate fragmentation of the human body. This is a reference to the great – as far as expression and significance are concerned – paintings by Francis Bacon. For example, the toilet bowl and legs attached to it seems to illustrate the postmodern thesis of the end of man and his humanistic, i.e. also metaphysical values. However, Hebda does not give way to eclecticism or some phony forms of academic art nor is she too modernistic in constraining of the aura of art (in the sense of Walter Benjamin’s term). Let us look, then, at the delicate trails leading towards old art, for example at the draped ancient robes, at the skull and at Hebda’s still-life - though all interpreted in a modern, contemporary way.
Krzysztof Jurecki