Over the last few years Agnieszka Żak’s painting has evolved as fast as it was surprising. While she was a student, she already touched difficult social issues. “The Apocalypsiss” cycle focused on children victims of the war, whose photographs were used on the covers of high-volume magazines. The diploma project created under the direction of Professor Jarosław Modzelewski has touched on the topic of schizophrenia – disintegration and finally social degradation of individuals. The formal convention was adequate to the content – difficult, brutalizing, consciously unaesthetic and uncompromising.

Transformation stage were „Carousels”, formally pleasant, easy but mysterious. Sharp contrasts gave the impression of incompatibility of the subject and recognition. There was something unsaid and dark, which became clear after the disclosure of the title – “Campo di Fiori”, taken from a poem by Czesław Miłosz.

Amusement parks – the quintessence of consumerism, in their assumption were to be a safety valve for multicultural melting pots of modern societies. They became synonymous of the contemporary trivialized and dwarfed Tower of Babel. Mass entertainment giving temporary, apparent emotional freedom, was only a smokescreen for real subcutaneous tensions and dramas.

The carousel from Krasinski Square stunned the inhuman tragedy of the last act of the ghetto uprising. With time, in the painting by Agnieszka Żak, the objective recognition has lost its meaning. Her pictures have been more and more colorful, geometric puzzles. Rotating carousels transformed into shimmering, dynamic forms. She was only a step away from circles, squares, waves and zigzags placed on scarves.

The Shawl cycle, painted from 2014, became the subject of a doctorate defended under the direction of Prof. Stanisław Baj. Material recognition of textiles was a strong, but last link with objectiveness. In a seductive way, the artist combined realistic „materialism” with symbolic „spiritualism”. Painted with incredible meticulousness, hyper-realistic, patterned materials became a kind of mandala referring the visible to the invisible. The archetypal repertoire of ornaments, today unfortunately silent, is an attempt to order the world. For example, braided lines are an image of an infinite system of connections between phenomena.  The squares depict the cosmos and the four elements. The circles depict the female element and the highest degree of initiation. The artist emphasizes that by juxtaposing motifs and symbols, often originating from different cultures, she „designs and directs the moment of their meeting”. She makes cultural reinterpretations. There is a disturbance in her paintings, a cultural clash and at the same time a disturbance in the experience of temporal processes. We can experience the timelessness and the difficult to grasp uncertainties of these shots.

The painting by Agnieszka Żak is extremely sensual. Its origins goes back to the sensual pictures by Ingres. One cannot resist the impression that the tonda “Three Shawls in the Circle” and “The Shawl” are maintained in a similar harem-oriental poetics as the “Turkish Bath”. The Shawls become the designator of the odalisks.

What’s more, in Ingres’ portraits, matter is the most sensual element. They create a sensual, almost erotic tension between the image and the viewer. The artist is fascinated by the graphic element, hence the title of the exhibition: Blue Line. The local colour, within the limits of the form, surprises with its intensity. It seems that the feast of colors is bursting the canvases.

The artist seduces with her excellent technique and sophisticated Baroque aesthetics. The oily slipperyness of shining silks is so material that it seems to evoke haptic sensations.

There is no Ingressian restraint, moderation and cool classical refinement. The form is boiling. It is full of excess. It thickens. We have an impression of excess. Sensual apnea horror vacui.

In this painting there is a feminine obsession and persistence in repeating the motif, a Benedictine, tireless work, when the canvas is filled with a mosaic of tiny squares.

Ingres builds torsoes and heads of his puppets almost exclusively from the circle. Agnieszka Żak introduces circles in the ornament. Next to them she reveals the vaginal form of the flower. The works can be read on many levels. We find in them both intimacy and a strong manifesto of feminism. It is striking that the conventions of Western European and Eastern art are mixed – the Byzantine-Russian splendour of the decoration and the Western ideological concept are permeated. The artist strives to make her paintings only seemingly remain on the level of decorative textile motifs close to the art of the East. Their real interpretation goes far beyond ornamentation. It speaks about the cultural entanglement of gender with from the point of view of religious and political stereotypes, about the desacralisation of femininity, about longing. There is mystery, subcutaneous anxiety, some kind of fate and seriousness in these pictures, despite the apparent visual lightness.

Katarzyna Haber