Kinga Popiela

Confronted with most visual artwork, we tend not to pay attention to the subcutaneous presence of the “artist’s vitality” in the works. We tend to focus on the “picture of the picture”, i.e. what it represents, what its assumed and materialized vision serves. We look at the visual value: technique, mastery of the form used, and by their means we activate imagination, absorb the observable associations, decipher the camouflaged codes.

Kinga Popiela does not concentrate her painterly attention on the final effect, and – far from ignoring its ultimate significance – focusses on the PROCESS of creating a picture instead.

Is the approach unusual?

Actually, it is. Her pictures register the period of “becoming” a work of art, and it is a unique characteristic on the map of young contemporary painting. The exposure of passing time in a picture and the direct, physical contact with painting surface for which she is herself an extraordinary, flexible tool, determine the final visual effect of her works. However, let us pay particular attention to the fact that the notation is – as mentioned above – directed backwards, towards the process. It is its recording and documentation, a notation of corporeal contact of an artist with her own work, a story of herself, her bodily motor functions, without any unnecessary narration, without any mediation of a borrowed aesthetic canon.

Her painting “world” is composed of matter (paper, canvas, ink or paint) and a trace of presence, a simple and natural story about direct activity in the face of elements of an image growing in time. But not only that.

This is what art theoretician Marta Smolińska wrote in the catalogue accompanying Kinga Popiela’s solo exhibition at the Art Gallery in Legnica: “Kinga Popiela’s works confront the viewer with a mystery confirming the still relevant power of abstract form which lays foundations for the pleasure we take when facing the unknown, proportional to our awareness of the simplicity of means used in creating the picture”.

Kinga Popiela develops her art creating thematic series. The form of each new series is significantly different from the previous one. It clearly results from the initial assumptions of the work, its subject and concept, each time requiring the use of a different processual approach. All these components determine the final effect of her works. Discipline and chance coexist here – in perfect symbiosis.

Kinga is an intriguing painterly “calligrapher of herself” and at the same time – something that does not prove contradictory – a calligrapher of concepts with deep intellectual foundations. In a striking way, she appears to be a continuator of action painting in the style of Jackson Pollock or Georges Mathieu and – surprisingly – also founders of conceptual art close to the thought of Roman Opałka or Stanisław Dróżdż.

Jerzy Hejnowicz

www.popiela.tumblr.com