Katarzyna Przezwańska
Nice and pleasant
Katarzyna Przezwańska’s objects, films, photographs, as well as images constitute a container of forms, not only inspired by the organic world, but striving to become the new, equal part. These third forms – hybrid, modified, processed, simultaneously undermine the definition of nature through the penetration of that which exists, and that which is yet to be concocted and implemented.
A leaf with an intensely azure vein; a runner, whose motion becomes a temporary ornament on a roof warmed up by the sun, a line drawn into the fabric of the city; an image presenting the structure of wood; candidates for mayor located in the Amazon Tupana, wearing simple, colorful dresses in six organic patterns. The local colors gain literal meaning in Przezwańska’s work – the colors of the natural environment, abstracted from the landscape by the artist and processed into a pattern on the fabric become the local colors, while simultaneously providing a protective entry into the background and a strong sense of the location’s identity. Short film samples of the visual structure of reality, flowingly passing from organic images through the geometric forms of South American modernist authors (for example, Lina Bo Bardi), to anonymous decorations and temporary ornaments arising from a one-time meeting of color and movement, sparkling colors and street performance.
The boundary between nature and culture becomes effaced and the penetration effectuates bilaterally – abstract, intellectual design based on the fragments of real colors, a real leaf is transformed into a non-natural object of art, whilst still remaining a leaf. This treatment reminds how dubious this duality is, entailing further crucial distinctions between such categories as: artificial and real, created and authentic, civilized and wild, restrained and untamed, etc.
Appearing in these forms, are after-sights of the unfinished project of modernity and the effects of its precursors with Johannes Itten and the forefront bauhaus analysis of colors, and their late, non-European continuators or the finally simplified (but most widespread) visual patterns of mass implementations, enlivened contemporarily with the cheap make-up of facades. Katarzyna Przezwańska’s projects go beyond the classic discussion focused around the opposite style, faint monochromatism and multi-colored, trashy gaudiness, and beyond the stereotypes of emotional expression of color in architecture, design, fashion and space (defining colors as “happy” and “sad” that shape the atmosphere of a place positively or negatively as well as the behavior of its occupants). The historical, social or ideological diagnosis is replaced by the expenditure of the field and introduction of remixed of forms and colors in the ever changing real locations. This strategy combines with the analytical and interdisciplinary attitude of the first avant-garde, but without dogmatism, and follows a genuinely enthusiastic interest in the world and as possibilities to intervene and interplay with its visible structures.
Kaja Pawełek
