Dorota Wielkosielec
text by Marek Borawski
text by C. Pius Ciapało
text by Zofia Bisiak
text by Ewa Zelenay
text by C. Pius Ciapało
text by Maria Wrońska-Friend
text by Marzena Guzowska
The audience from the Abacus Gallery remembers well the attractive batiks by Dorota Wielkosielec. From one exhibition to another there is more and more impressive craziness of formats and she geniously masters the technique. The retrospection of her art in which she has raised the tapestry craft was shown this year in the spring in the Textile Museum in Łódź. There lives an exuberant creative spirit in the author, and this is why she still experiments. Creation is inscribed in her personality, common view, when it stops her eye and stirs the imagination; it starts to get an unexpected shape and colour.
The present exhibition of water colour sketches is a good chance to see how with this artist starts the process of receding from real shape, how without mercy and compositional aim she abandons real colour. She looks at animals and domestic fowl, surely not without kindness as she has graduated zoo-technical studies, she draws, dips her brush in the water colours, but in her head there starts to grow her own vision and it follows her. Three cows didn’t manage to move and yet they do not stand in technicolour, their shapes geometrize, 3D disappears. Slate. Action! And gone. She won’t be back for a vacation sketch; she will rather draw other geometric shapes on hectares of a new cotton matter. At the time of the exhibition she has added to animal and bird portraits an ellipsoidal passe-partout, she lets go the eye to the audience, and maybe she also had an inner need to join two shapes – real and abstract? Beginning and end. She will later roll the papers, throw the briefcase to the home dust’s embrace, her thought and activity will be in some other place. We cannot enter into somebody’s creation process. This is a mystery.
text by Marzenna Guzowska
The present exhibition of water colour sketches is a good chance to see how with this artist starts the process of receding from real shape, how without mercy and compositional aim she abandons real colour. She looks at animals and domestic fowl, surely not without kindness as she has graduated zoo-technical studies, she draws, dips her brush in the water colours, but in her head there starts to grow her own vision and it follows her. Three cows didn’t manage to move and yet they do not stand in technicolour, their shapes geometrize, 3D disappears. Slate. Action! And gone. She won’t be back for a vacation sketch; she will rather draw other geometric shapes on hectares of a new cotton matter. At the time of the exhibition she has added to animal and bird portraits an ellipsoidal passe-partout, she lets go the eye to the audience, and maybe she also had an inner need to join two shapes – real and abstract? Beginning and end. She will later roll the papers, throw the briefcase to the home dust’s embrace, her thought and activity will be in some other place. We cannot enter into somebody’s creation process. This is a mystery.
text by Marzenna Guzowska
This exhibition of monumental batiks by Dorota Wielkosielec in the Museum of Textile Industry presents a choice of her works from the last seven years; from the cycle „Night Lights” (nocturnes), „Windows” (details of modern big city architecture), „Wings” (transformed metaphorically almost symmetric diptychs) and „Landscapes” (almost abstractive, taken straight from nature, shots of genuine nature). A mutual trait is the usage of the transparency of bright colourful cotton linen hung in space. With expression of colours and the act of the air batiks seem to take us into the interior of enormous cathedrals (stained glass windows, into the silence of contemplation over being and fate –
served to the audience with hedonistic admiration over the world and colour.
text by Pius Ciapało
text by Pius Ciapało
More and more people in the world have got to know what batik is. Most of them when seeing the trivial easiness of obtaining a colourful picture fall into admiration when they see the enchanting effects of their artistic incompetence, unskillfulness in drawing and even lack of skill or feeling and taste in composing their own painting. The location of its elements, rapprochement or distance of a frame especially, falls almost into „addiction to batiking”. Thanks to dyeing in cold colour – all the colours are altogether OK. All around the world people in Indonesia, Australia and Oceania, in Americas, the whole of Asia, Europe (even in post USSR countries) and in Africa, are practicing batik. In this moment, as I am writing this – they are batiking.
All around the world there are clubs created and associations of people batiking. This is an absolute phenomenon of the last years of the XXth and XXIst century in art. There are organized meetings, international seminars and symposia’s of scientists, artists, enthusiasts and ordinary amateurs. Batiking is „trendy”. Artistic XXth century painting in a traditional understanding of the painting through the marketisation of art has become a rejected medium by many painters. Disappointment with the manipulation of painting and international swindle in so called „modern” art, leads many thinking, well-educated and simple people to create just for the pleasure of creation (without this well learned definitions not adequate to hidden commercial purposes).
Dorota Wielkosielec is without doubt one of the very first in the world who out of the craft of this colouring technique makes valuable, pure painting.
text by Andrzej Opieńka, 2008
All around the world there are clubs created and associations of people batiking. This is an absolute phenomenon of the last years of the XXth and XXIst century in art. There are organized meetings, international seminars and symposia’s of scientists, artists, enthusiasts and ordinary amateurs. Batiking is „trendy”. Artistic XXth century painting in a traditional understanding of the painting through the marketisation of art has become a rejected medium by many painters. Disappointment with the manipulation of painting and international swindle in so called „modern” art, leads many thinking, well-educated and simple people to create just for the pleasure of creation (without this well learned definitions not adequate to hidden commercial purposes).
Dorota Wielkosielec is without doubt one of the very first in the world who out of the craft of this colouring technique makes valuable, pure painting.
text by Andrzej Opieńka, 2008
„NIGHT LIGHTS” – nocturnes and not only
There are two batiks. The first, a kind of „school” on paper using ink or water colours and paraffin candle and the second one – „classic batik” which came to Europe from Indonesia through India, Arabic countries, Spain and Holland.
In Poland, during the interwar period, the Antoni Buszka Workshops tried to adapt polish folk motifs created in this technique. In the 80’s, Zofia Bisiak (The Centre of Cultural Animation in Warsaw) reactivated the tradition through workshops in the open air for teachers of art. Among many participants – very few of them adapted this technique for creative purposes.
Dorota Wielkosielec is one of those few who consistently for many years has practiced batik in a creative way, on a big scale. In high rooms, like stained glass window, against the light, she often exhibits long batiks to extract all the possible advantages of the fabric. Its lightness, breathability, but not flimsiness like silk, she extracts from them transparent possibilities. The colour presented to the audience in such a way is bright, when in the context of cold and dark it uses „these tints”, bright greens, yellows, oranges or fantastic shades of pink or purple. She transforms white „sheet like” cotton linen into sharp, vivid, pulsing like vivid young muscles energized by oxygen like tissue of matter.
„Night Lights” (nocturnes) presented by Dorota Wielkosielec in Abacus Gallery in Warsaw caused amusement and serious appreciation. Some of the nocturnes – bright neon exclamation marks on the Warsaw sky – have also appeared here. The picture form the folder comes from there entitled City nocturne with over a dozen of its variants, but not only. Triptich „Paravan”, created for three-wing furniture, shows a landscape – trees, in a slightly reflective way, dark with no water lilies visible. The paravan smells like wax and paraffin but the colours seen through the light show a good, very good eye and steady hand… Some others like pink diptych foretell a turn towards nature where seen with the eye of a painter light changed into batik lights up with faith and hope for better, wiser times. Also in art.
text by Pius Ciapało
There are two batiks. The first, a kind of „school” on paper using ink or water colours and paraffin candle and the second one – „classic batik” which came to Europe from Indonesia through India, Arabic countries, Spain and Holland.
In Poland, during the interwar period, the Antoni Buszka Workshops tried to adapt polish folk motifs created in this technique. In the 80’s, Zofia Bisiak (The Centre of Cultural Animation in Warsaw) reactivated the tradition through workshops in the open air for teachers of art. Among many participants – very few of them adapted this technique for creative purposes.
Dorota Wielkosielec is one of those few who consistently for many years has practiced batik in a creative way, on a big scale. In high rooms, like stained glass window, against the light, she often exhibits long batiks to extract all the possible advantages of the fabric. Its lightness, breathability, but not flimsiness like silk, she extracts from them transparent possibilities. The colour presented to the audience in such a way is bright, when in the context of cold and dark it uses „these tints”, bright greens, yellows, oranges or fantastic shades of pink or purple. She transforms white „sheet like” cotton linen into sharp, vivid, pulsing like vivid young muscles energized by oxygen like tissue of matter.
„Night Lights” (nocturnes) presented by Dorota Wielkosielec in Abacus Gallery in Warsaw caused amusement and serious appreciation. Some of the nocturnes – bright neon exclamation marks on the Warsaw sky – have also appeared here. The picture form the folder comes from there entitled City nocturne with over a dozen of its variants, but not only. Triptich „Paravan”, created for three-wing furniture, shows a landscape – trees, in a slightly reflective way, dark with no water lilies visible. The paravan smells like wax and paraffin but the colours seen through the light show a good, very good eye and steady hand… Some others like pink diptych foretell a turn towards nature where seen with the eye of a painter light changed into batik lights up with faith and hope for better, wiser times. Also in art.
text by Pius Ciapało
„NIGHT LIGHTS” – nocturnes and not only
Night is a mysterious dimension. Its space-time has its own rhythm, melody and emotions. And although for most of us it is related to dream images and most often is presented as an image of a dark navy blue sky illuminated in some places by light spots of star light and moon – in the city landscape it pulses with lots of colours. This alchemy in an adequately magical and artistic way was presented by Dorota Wielkosielec in the cycle „Night Lights”.
Paintings, made using a very time consuming technique – batik, linen dyed many times absorbing the light of colours, suitable not only to vision and project, but also to a note of unpredictable moments in the joining of colours. Not accidently the artist, who is one of the best experts in the sphere of batik in the country, uses it. This technique is for her an interesting medium which lets her obtain new colour and formal solutions and at the same time brings a note of the unknown to the final effect. Thanks to this, on a vertical large works we find pieces of ink coloured sky and the shining city lights in their unsymmetrical arrangement. Cobalts, greens, reds, oranges and purples create an impression of saturated stained glass windows which absorb the light in a beautiful way. It has the strength not only to show colourful and compositional advantages of Nocturnes, but also a consistent element of this air painting, as Dorota Wielkosielec paints the night beyond prosiness. With courage and harmony she reflects her own great emotionality, the need to express herself and this most inspires her in the night. It seems that it is due to her curiosity of the world, observed places and intrigue yet having reflection in a painter’s imagination and correlation on a wide range of sensations for pictures.
Fascinated by colours of the world, as we have to say the artist observes in a very detailed and subtle way not only the night but also times of the day and year, shown in the latest works, very picturesque, marked with a smooth line and landscapes full of stains of colours, in a poetic way showing details of the landscape with a respectful admiration of them. And it turns out that in her painting even the most contrast sets resonate well. You can hear music. Standing vis a vis the painting of a night nocturne, we imagine that we are looking at a night landscape of a city from a bird’s perspective; we see busy roads as they cross, passing cars… Or we see walls of houses with irregular light arrangement, far from the uniformity of concrete and steel constructions, which echo, are some structural divisions of colourful fields on paintings. We see movement and sleep, moon becoming light on construction equipment. We can be inside the factory or imagine a walk during the night as we pass by multiple colours and sounds.
The atmosphere is special and makes an impression. A feeling, so rare recently of wanting to stay as long as possible in this exhibition surrounded by „Night Lights”, muting of busy steps, saturated by colours, space and the very unusual perspective of Dorota Wielkosielec’s view of the pulsing night life.
text by Helena Sienkiewicz, March 2004
Night is a mysterious dimension. Its space-time has its own rhythm, melody and emotions. And although for most of us it is related to dream images and most often is presented as an image of a dark navy blue sky illuminated in some places by light spots of star light and moon – in the city landscape it pulses with lots of colours. This alchemy in an adequately magical and artistic way was presented by Dorota Wielkosielec in the cycle „Night Lights”.
Paintings, made using a very time consuming technique – batik, linen dyed many times absorbing the light of colours, suitable not only to vision and project, but also to a note of unpredictable moments in the joining of colours. Not accidently the artist, who is one of the best experts in the sphere of batik in the country, uses it. This technique is for her an interesting medium which lets her obtain new colour and formal solutions and at the same time brings a note of the unknown to the final effect. Thanks to this, on a vertical large works we find pieces of ink coloured sky and the shining city lights in their unsymmetrical arrangement. Cobalts, greens, reds, oranges and purples create an impression of saturated stained glass windows which absorb the light in a beautiful way. It has the strength not only to show colourful and compositional advantages of Nocturnes, but also a consistent element of this air painting, as Dorota Wielkosielec paints the night beyond prosiness. With courage and harmony she reflects her own great emotionality, the need to express herself and this most inspires her in the night. It seems that it is due to her curiosity of the world, observed places and intrigue yet having reflection in a painter’s imagination and correlation on a wide range of sensations for pictures.
Fascinated by colours of the world, as we have to say the artist observes in a very detailed and subtle way not only the night but also times of the day and year, shown in the latest works, very picturesque, marked with a smooth line and landscapes full of stains of colours, in a poetic way showing details of the landscape with a respectful admiration of them. And it turns out that in her painting even the most contrast sets resonate well. You can hear music. Standing vis a vis the painting of a night nocturne, we imagine that we are looking at a night landscape of a city from a bird’s perspective; we see busy roads as they cross, passing cars… Or we see walls of houses with irregular light arrangement, far from the uniformity of concrete and steel constructions, which echo, are some structural divisions of colourful fields on paintings. We see movement and sleep, moon becoming light on construction equipment. We can be inside the factory or imagine a walk during the night as we pass by multiple colours and sounds.
The atmosphere is special and makes an impression. A feeling, so rare recently of wanting to stay as long as possible in this exhibition surrounded by „Night Lights”, muting of busy steps, saturated by colours, space and the very unusual perspective of Dorota Wielkosielec’s view of the pulsing night life.
text by Helena Sienkiewicz, March 2004
Between magic of the night and reality – Dorota Wielkosielec painting.
The night landscape seen through the eyes of Dorota Wielkosielec is a picture of a city full of colours, far from concrete sameness and steel constructions. There is a sky with hundreds of lights, there is the moon immerged in it, movement and sleep. This painter’s emotional way of seeing the colours of the capital city, how gently she teams them with urban structures – is shown in her new cycle of work „Night lights”. Created using the batik method, the vertical paintings are exhibited in the Abacus Gallery (4 Jezuicka Street) till 16th November, in an amazing, you could say alchemic way, and they absorb the light which extracts its colour and composition values.
Helena Sienkiewicz (WIK) – In the latest cycle „Night lights” you managed to extract from the night what it has most beautiful. What is worth underlining – from the city landscape.
Dorota Wielkosielec – Often coming back home late in the evening I looked at the beautiful ink colour sky and somewhere in the distance, not very far, I observed hot, fruity colours. I was fascinated by brightlights, their asymmetrical arrangement. I was also intrigued that in each of those places something was happening, I was intrigued by life pulsing there. These impressions inspired me to show the variety and colours of the night landscape.
– You surprise us simultaneously with courage and harmony while matching the elements.
– I think the courage comes from my enormous emotionality, especially when I feel the need to express myself. I show it both in soaring forms and colour. Colours fascinate me; I am full of admiration for its variety in nature. There, even the most contrast sets, you could say excluding each other, harmonize.
– Light plays an important role. It extracts from your works extreme painting values but also formal ones. Thanks to this we can look at the pictures as on vertical walls, big city sky scrapers or from their perspective – pulsing urban traffic.
– I tried to suggest all nuances of the city landscape. I tried to show the elements of the structure of buildings, their corrosion with all the richness of night lights, advertisements, movement and, what seems important – some noticeable discipline, not only the line arrangement.
– What else causes that from a city landscape you extract so much magic, often resembling the one from middle-ages stained glass windows?
– „Night Lights” are the next step in my researches and here I continue with some criteria of arranging the world. But from the beginning I am accompanied by thoughts about certain geometric constructions, inspired by what I see, passes me by, meet in night landscape and also in pictures from my memories.
– Batik is a very time consuming technique which you actually use to paint.
– From the beginning batik was a very interesting medium for me, enabling me to obtain new colour and formal solutions in painting. This tiny note of unknown of the final effect is also magnesium which, next to water colour and oil painting, makes batik one of my favourite techniques.
– You are one of the best experts in the country in the sphere of batik, managing in the Capital Centre of Cultural Education, batik workshop.
– My aim was to create a real studio where the possibilities of dyeing are endless. During our classes there are people very much interested in this technique, also instructors from other places, students, and teachers. Batik studio is definitely an interesting supplement for SCEK (Capital Centre of Cultural Education) educational offer, and the exhibitions which I organize for workshop participants, confirm this fact.
– In addition to the title of your actual exhibition, will the day, similarly to night become the main character of the next cycle?
– Night seems to be more mysterious. I don’t see any prosaic in it – just a wide range of colours and then the imagination starts to work really intensively. In daylight, especially in the summer, there are completely different, but also very much fascinating, tones. That is why I think about this next light source of inspiration.
translated by Monika Nowak
The night landscape seen through the eyes of Dorota Wielkosielec is a picture of a city full of colours, far from concrete sameness and steel constructions. There is a sky with hundreds of lights, there is the moon immerged in it, movement and sleep. This painter’s emotional way of seeing the colours of the capital city, how gently she teams them with urban structures – is shown in her new cycle of work „Night lights”. Created using the batik method, the vertical paintings are exhibited in the Abacus Gallery (4 Jezuicka Street) till 16th November, in an amazing, you could say alchemic way, and they absorb the light which extracts its colour and composition values.
Helena Sienkiewicz (WIK) – In the latest cycle „Night lights” you managed to extract from the night what it has most beautiful. What is worth underlining – from the city landscape.
Dorota Wielkosielec – Often coming back home late in the evening I looked at the beautiful ink colour sky and somewhere in the distance, not very far, I observed hot, fruity colours. I was fascinated by brightlights, their asymmetrical arrangement. I was also intrigued that in each of those places something was happening, I was intrigued by life pulsing there. These impressions inspired me to show the variety and colours of the night landscape.
– You surprise us simultaneously with courage and harmony while matching the elements.
– I think the courage comes from my enormous emotionality, especially when I feel the need to express myself. I show it both in soaring forms and colour. Colours fascinate me; I am full of admiration for its variety in nature. There, even the most contrast sets, you could say excluding each other, harmonize.
– Light plays an important role. It extracts from your works extreme painting values but also formal ones. Thanks to this we can look at the pictures as on vertical walls, big city sky scrapers or from their perspective – pulsing urban traffic.
– I tried to suggest all nuances of the city landscape. I tried to show the elements of the structure of buildings, their corrosion with all the richness of night lights, advertisements, movement and, what seems important – some noticeable discipline, not only the line arrangement.
– What else causes that from a city landscape you extract so much magic, often resembling the one from middle-ages stained glass windows?
– „Night Lights” are the next step in my researches and here I continue with some criteria of arranging the world. But from the beginning I am accompanied by thoughts about certain geometric constructions, inspired by what I see, passes me by, meet in night landscape and also in pictures from my memories.
– Batik is a very time consuming technique which you actually use to paint.
– From the beginning batik was a very interesting medium for me, enabling me to obtain new colour and formal solutions in painting. This tiny note of unknown of the final effect is also magnesium which, next to water colour and oil painting, makes batik one of my favourite techniques.
– You are one of the best experts in the country in the sphere of batik, managing in the Capital Centre of Cultural Education, batik workshop.
– My aim was to create a real studio where the possibilities of dyeing are endless. During our classes there are people very much interested in this technique, also instructors from other places, students, and teachers. Batik studio is definitely an interesting supplement for SCEK (Capital Centre of Cultural Education) educational offer, and the exhibitions which I organize for workshop participants, confirm this fact.
– In addition to the title of your actual exhibition, will the day, similarly to night become the main character of the next cycle?
– Night seems to be more mysterious. I don’t see any prosaic in it – just a wide range of colours and then the imagination starts to work really intensively. In daylight, especially in the summer, there are completely different, but also very much fascinating, tones. That is why I think about this next light source of inspiration.
translated by Monika Nowak
WINGS II
Batik with edges of cotton sheet exceeding three metres of length takes ones breath away. This is an intriguing originality itself. To find yourself in a surrounding of twelve curtains, glowing with colours placed in compartments of geometric figures, which arrange themselves in bigger shapes until they create a full vision of what it means to experience a great adventure surrendering to a shining of a phenomenon. Dorota Wielkosielec amuses her audience not for the first time, with the unique size of her paintings preserved on fabric thanks to the batik technique. It seems that she has reached the level of workshop skills that almost eliminate accidental blurs of edges or colours, but still she experiments.
Works from the last two years, belonging to the diptych cycle „Wings” are even more beautiful, colours more pure with symmetry more perfect. The geometric scale leaves a person looking at it speechless. Moving your sight from one painting onto another, this impression increases. It is as the inside of an oratorio suspended in cosmic space. The Artistic building is without a place and does not concretise in a certainty of one meaning. Are those imaginary „Wings” open on the unknown or the other way round - veiling the infinite with its materiality? Maybe in those curtains there is everything we need to know? Because these are not just tapestries for aesthetic delight, they work as a painting. The sophisticated combined colours emanate with energy in light with lines not limited to vive for colours. Together they are immersed in space created on the surface of the monumental painting, occupied only with themselves, distant, unattainable, and perpetual. From up close, visible marks of wax put together with the hand of the artist, create a net merged into this one, which seemed an untouchably perfect construction of colours and lines. And immediately, previous tension descends, there is a gap, which is filled with emotion, because these inevitable remains after dying the fabric, have something organic, bringing down levitating thoughts on the human ground of sensual experiences. The closeness of tamed reality is warmed by ontological cold and allows agreement with the artist.
Such courageous lavishing with abstraction at the beginning of the 21st century intrigues, so almost exactly 100 years after the first revelations of explorers painting detachment from objectivity, in time, when definite exhaustion of this trend in art was announced. Dorota Wielkosielec never describes her works herself, she doesn’t talk about the process of creation, does not submit meanings, does not paint on inspiration of another art and she does not submit to any convictions. She looks, follows her instinct, improves her workshop, and the rest is a matter of talent. Trite premise but why do they lead to such results which we see? It is known that she does not use ready-made artistic convention and that she has never stopped observing nature. She still paints animals in watercolour, landscapes, different objects (exhibition of outdoor sketches, SCEK 2011) and draws and when she starts actual work with batik, her narrative memory seems not to take art at all, and the only visible thing is the abstractive form determined in colour and geometrical shape.
From that you can ascertain that Wielkosielec thinks only through paintings, creates from her internal imperative completely out of desire and the need to verbalize existential experiments, emotional states, artistic motives, a path to a final form. Colours and drawing are unity here; they couldn’t create a work of art without each other. Actual life experience and constant traits of the artist’s character can be seen in pure and vivid colour which in the process of creating art clears out from emotion and changes its colour into a spiritual one. Lines surround her, they are architecture for her, and they built up space. Maybe this association with oratorio comes from a feeling exceeding rational explanations.
What is this spiritual in art, this either she nor her author says. Wassil Kandinsky named creative intuition „internal necessity” and claims that it shapes creation of all times and in abstraction it shows itself as undefiled with anything. When the line gets released from acting as a mimetic function and is treated as a thing, then it has fullness of internal strength, which unites art and world, and is a living spirit of dead matter. Wilhelm Worringer, one generation younger German art historian, he was convinced that primary artistic impulse has nothing in common with imitating nature, while abstraction taking geometric shapes is a human instinctive answer to experiencing the external world. Kazimierz Malewicz thought of pointless feelings as the only authentic and deepest way to exist in this world and creating an obligation to express it, seeking absolute purity. According to Mondrian, the starting point to formulate general laws ruling art is to observe detail in nature.
Dorota Wielkosielec’s creativeness gives testament to truths discovered one hundred years ago by the first abstractionists, parenthesizing the next versions of theory and practices until conventional insincerity and finally its extinction. Wielkosielec’s creation, from the first observation and artistic impulse until the last stain of colour hidden under wax, is again as pure as at the beginning, free from the hum of assumptions. That is why it can have an important share in postmodern discourse, when from abstractive art there is separation between worldviews, ideological, political labels, social programmes, requests of originality or philosophical speculation or even her own history. Is this going to be coming full circle or a journey into unknown? We shall not find out without risk. Curiosity rises.
text by Marzenna Guzowska
Batik with edges of cotton sheet exceeding three metres of length takes ones breath away. This is an intriguing originality itself. To find yourself in a surrounding of twelve curtains, glowing with colours placed in compartments of geometric figures, which arrange themselves in bigger shapes until they create a full vision of what it means to experience a great adventure surrendering to a shining of a phenomenon. Dorota Wielkosielec amuses her audience not for the first time, with the unique size of her paintings preserved on fabric thanks to the batik technique. It seems that she has reached the level of workshop skills that almost eliminate accidental blurs of edges or colours, but still she experiments.
Works from the last two years, belonging to the diptych cycle „Wings” are even more beautiful, colours more pure with symmetry more perfect. The geometric scale leaves a person looking at it speechless. Moving your sight from one painting onto another, this impression increases. It is as the inside of an oratorio suspended in cosmic space. The Artistic building is without a place and does not concretise in a certainty of one meaning. Are those imaginary „Wings” open on the unknown or the other way round - veiling the infinite with its materiality? Maybe in those curtains there is everything we need to know? Because these are not just tapestries for aesthetic delight, they work as a painting. The sophisticated combined colours emanate with energy in light with lines not limited to vive for colours. Together they are immersed in space created on the surface of the monumental painting, occupied only with themselves, distant, unattainable, and perpetual. From up close, visible marks of wax put together with the hand of the artist, create a net merged into this one, which seemed an untouchably perfect construction of colours and lines. And immediately, previous tension descends, there is a gap, which is filled with emotion, because these inevitable remains after dying the fabric, have something organic, bringing down levitating thoughts on the human ground of sensual experiences. The closeness of tamed reality is warmed by ontological cold and allows agreement with the artist.
Such courageous lavishing with abstraction at the beginning of the 21st century intrigues, so almost exactly 100 years after the first revelations of explorers painting detachment from objectivity, in time, when definite exhaustion of this trend in art was announced. Dorota Wielkosielec never describes her works herself, she doesn’t talk about the process of creation, does not submit meanings, does not paint on inspiration of another art and she does not submit to any convictions. She looks, follows her instinct, improves her workshop, and the rest is a matter of talent. Trite premise but why do they lead to such results which we see? It is known that she does not use ready-made artistic convention and that she has never stopped observing nature. She still paints animals in watercolour, landscapes, different objects (exhibition of outdoor sketches, SCEK 2011) and draws and when she starts actual work with batik, her narrative memory seems not to take art at all, and the only visible thing is the abstractive form determined in colour and geometrical shape.
From that you can ascertain that Wielkosielec thinks only through paintings, creates from her internal imperative completely out of desire and the need to verbalize existential experiments, emotional states, artistic motives, a path to a final form. Colours and drawing are unity here; they couldn’t create a work of art without each other. Actual life experience and constant traits of the artist’s character can be seen in pure and vivid colour which in the process of creating art clears out from emotion and changes its colour into a spiritual one. Lines surround her, they are architecture for her, and they built up space. Maybe this association with oratorio comes from a feeling exceeding rational explanations.
What is this spiritual in art, this either she nor her author says. Wassil Kandinsky named creative intuition „internal necessity” and claims that it shapes creation of all times and in abstraction it shows itself as undefiled with anything. When the line gets released from acting as a mimetic function and is treated as a thing, then it has fullness of internal strength, which unites art and world, and is a living spirit of dead matter. Wilhelm Worringer, one generation younger German art historian, he was convinced that primary artistic impulse has nothing in common with imitating nature, while abstraction taking geometric shapes is a human instinctive answer to experiencing the external world. Kazimierz Malewicz thought of pointless feelings as the only authentic and deepest way to exist in this world and creating an obligation to express it, seeking absolute purity. According to Mondrian, the starting point to formulate general laws ruling art is to observe detail in nature.
Dorota Wielkosielec’s creativeness gives testament to truths discovered one hundred years ago by the first abstractionists, parenthesizing the next versions of theory and practices until conventional insincerity and finally its extinction. Wielkosielec’s creation, from the first observation and artistic impulse until the last stain of colour hidden under wax, is again as pure as at the beginning, free from the hum of assumptions. That is why it can have an important share in postmodern discourse, when from abstractive art there is separation between worldviews, ideological, political labels, social programmes, requests of originality or philosophical speculation or even her own history. Is this going to be coming full circle or a journey into unknown? We shall not find out without risk. Curiosity rises.
text by Marzenna Guzowska
