Perceiving the world, each time we create it again and again.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Painting is a matter of observation and it is sight which is the power and measure of the artist's imagination. As Józef Czapski used to say: A painter faces the world, observes everything quietly, immerses in the surrounding, a lonely vision, a sudden revelation - amazement by what has been seen starts with the act of seeing. There are quality, light, depth in front of us and around us as they evoke an echo in our body, as our body is ready to perceive them. The world of a painter is a visible world. Making their body available to the world the artist transfers the world into painting matter. They paint because they have seen and the world has coded the signs of the visible in them.

At first sight Krystyna's painting is associated with landscape, seems to originate from it. We could assume that her paintings are unique imagined landscapes, a space transferred on paper and canvas, with depth reaching an imagined or real horizon.

In this painting we are aware of musical inspirations and notions coming from this sphere, like fugue, sonata, partita or ballad, could be applied to its description. However, in case of Krystyna's painting we have to start with the very beginning, which means with the very activity, the act of painting. Thus it is worth recalling the obvious conclusion of philosophers which states that there is rather SOMETHING than NOTHING, that existence is always accompanied by non - existence. Durability is in a constant fight with transience and it is the artist who actually realises that what IS REAL now can be UNREAL in a moment.

In the act of creation the painter touches non - existence and the final result of their creative gesture is different from the original observation or experience. For Krystyna it seems to be the essence of painting. While painting she wants to preserve this amazement by the visible, she wants to keep the whole play of lines, shapes, forms difficult to express, the hardly seen being.

And the world which begins within the range of sight, within the range of visibility is given the way up, above the 'here and now' areas. If we assume, according to the rules of phenomenology, that our sight winds round the visible things, touches them, mingles with them, that it contributes to the revealed order of existence, Krystyna's painting is the best evidence for it. In her paintings the visible is a kind of a neck between the internal and external horizons. As M. Merleau-Ponty, quoted at the beginning, writes, it is less a colour or a thing but rather a difference between colours and things, a temporary crystallization of colourful existence. Between colours and visible things there is a fabric which is a lining for them, which maintains and feeds them, which is not an object but a potential matter, hidden depth and carnal tissue of things. Density of the carnal tissue becomes the way of communication between the observer and the world.

Thomas Stearns Eliot - Krystyna's favourite poet wrote:

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the shadow
(…)
Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
/Hollow Men/

Krystyna's painting seems to prove that one can paint the invisible, or at least TRY TO PAINT THE SHADOW.


Janusz Raczkiewicz

Translated by Elżbieta Rodzeń-Leśnikowska

Krystyna Raczkiewicz's work shows how ample nature is as a source of painting stimuli, with its richness of forms, phenomena, rhythms and structures, in still durability and cyclic changeability, in the truth of more general relationships revealed in it. Affirmation of nature and life often takes place under pressure of internal atmosphere, mood or emotional state of the artist. Thus the relationships connecting her with the visible world are not only optical but also lyrical. The element of sensual world in its relationships with man's intimate nature evokes a kind of emotional suspense which finds its way out in the area of painting.

The artists realizes the postulate of experience authenticity not in the form of impression but in an attempt to transfer it into the relationships of forms and colours. She looks for the synthesis of direct sensual perception of a fragment of nature with the search for the dominance of an impression in a landscape, its visual shape. What is most important here is not the very image of reality which is understood as its realistic reflection but emotions which are expressed by the arrangement of colourful elements of a composition. The painter presents the colourful tissue of the surrounding world resigning from its description.

She uses suggestive forms which influence our imagination. She creates an allusion or a mere optical suggestion of the elements of a landscape achieved by apparently abstract patches of colour. In most smaller works they are overlapped with dense spontaneous texture of drawing. Objects with clear forms are accompanied by soft tangles of vegetative shapes shown with a sound feeling of matter distinction. Everything is immersed in colour and light substance, sometimes stronger, sometimes delicate, smashed into atoms.

The division of the surface does not merely serve the purpose of creating an independent decorative arrangement (the artist does not tend to make her works decorative) but it is to point out the range of areas of different functions.

The clear arrangement of principal patches and forms builds - like phrases in the musical structure - the rhythm of the painting area. Among the spheres of intensive activity there spread the spheres of lower tension and stable silence. The construction, the play of arabesques and rhythms, colourful patches, sensual qualities express space, evoke real objects and create the sovereign system of painting.

The method used by the artist defines her way to achieve intensified power of expression; dynamism of gesture in the expressive painting alternates the tone of lyrical poetry. We observe the paintings. We admire joyful purity of landscape. We take in the view of hills' line flowing with a descending trail, we feel the blow of the wind from the sea, we can hear the rustle of rhythmically waving bulrush, we watch the geometric silhouettes of harmoniously distinguished green spreading over the horizon or triangles of yellow sails moving along the dense azure of a lake which saturates the surrounding with nutritious juices. First the post - August landscape explodes with mature colours, then November tames the temperament of nature, and finally the surfaces of ice sheets force their way into the landscape and freeze all movement. That is what happens in the Northern Countries.

In the south all colours do not liven up until the dusk. Before that we experience the breath taking heat of Mediterranean landscapes, we observe the Sun stealing colours and depriving the scenery of its brightness, matting the ridge of rocky hills. We smash limestone rocks and listen to the echoes of prehistoric time sunk in the form of fossils. Faded walls of houses last in thick air. From under the plaster the past tells its story using the shades of ochre. There speaks the beauty of remote cultures - distant yet close at the same time, as they belong to the same humanistic perspective.

Space of these works is not only the image space but also thought and psyche space whose limits are marked by: knowledge, experience and emotions. The culture space staying in the background is the space of western culture and civilisation in their Mediterranean dimension.

The works are supported by harmonious rhythm of human nature which penetrates the internal tissue of the works and appears outside taking the form of rhythms of expressive sign. The spontaneous expression is most clearly observed in the series of works where the technique of washing was applied. These works, mostly based on the limited palette and the principle of preserving the energy of gesture with strong colour accent dominating the background, become a kind of calligraphic record with the most intensive suspense. In many works emotions are expressed by suggestive colour, by clash between cold and warm tones. They are also the expression of relationship between light and shade where the determining value is not the relation between light and dark tones but rather warm and cold colours.

In Krystyna Raczkiewicz's works we feel the joy of creation maintained by the subtle sense of colour. As a result we can experience a wide rhythmic of values. The artist uses pretty non-aggressive shades of colour though sometimes one colour prevails and some compositions are based on more distinct contrasts: pinks and blues or values of red and green. Even in the compositions with more excited colour range there is a consistent discipline of colour patch. The effects enriching and dynamizing the compositions are subject to stabilising balance. Colour tension is achieved not due to dramatic contrasts but due to releasing the light out of the tonal arrangement.

The beams of light come out of the internal part of paintings. In the visual layer they emerge through some clearances left in the curtain of the sky, they shine through the trees, reflect in the sheet of water. In the artistic layer they radiate from colours, originate from the assumed chromatic relationships. Colour becomes 'dematerialised' - serves the purpose of stronger luminous effects. The most intensive light radiates from the white of fragments of paper not covered with paint.

The paint is laid with multi - direction strokes of a brush or a pencil. The use of both watercolours and oil pastels within one work enables the interesting textural acts. Krystyna Raczkiewicz contrasts surfaces which are thinly covered with paint with rough surfaces. Owing to the use of various painting techniques which co - exist on one surface the artist achieves differentiation of textural patches: mat and shiny, opaque and more transparent, and at the same time she obtains the physical, non - abstract presence of colour combined with the material medium e.g. in the layers dominated by gouache.

The painter covers the surface of her painting with layers of composition different in quality. She somehow lets them fight for their priority. She obtains - due to dry brush painting, or shine effects - the effect of exposing some accents out of the others, like it happens when the layers of time force their way through the subsequent layers of plaster put on the wall.

The large oil works become a logical development of search undertaken in small pastel works. Despite the similar themes and forms they are not only oil versions of the previous paintings. Emotions become transferred into other means of expression and they are revealed in a different way. Whereas in earlier works the artist concentrates more on the manifestations of a given phenomenon, in large oil works she creates a synthetic vision of its essence.

Paintings seem to be more homogenous, also owing to the uniform matter of oil paints, their texture and the role they play in creating the presented world. There are fewer spontaneous violent gestures here - their fever derives from the colour and tonal arrangement.

Krystyna Raczkiewicz constantly refers to the viewer's imagination. She lets her sometimes almost abstract landscapes evoke new and new ways of interpretation. She does not search for any alibi for her direct relationship with nature. For her it is simply the condition for creation and a guarantee to find new sources of inspiration. And last but not least it is a special way of agreement between the world and the human kind.


Dariusz Leśnikowski

Transl. Elżbieta Rodzeń-Leśnikowska