Tamara Sass's creation is both profoundly humanistic and very personal. The artist is the subject here even if she does not literally appear in it. Her anxieties - though she does not expose them to us directly - become a pretext to start a journey in search for her own identity. The first stage is an attempt to understand herself as well as the man existing in the world, being a part of it, phenomena which they witness and which they try to comprehend. The artistic expression becomes a metaphor of human considerations concerning the Truth, Good and Beauty. The man is the fundamental imagery element of Tamara Sass's work. In the texture layer of her works ambiguous figures appear, usually their heads or faces, which emerge from the background, outlined with a distinct contour.

Tension of lines seems to determine their dynamics. Sometimes other fragments appear - the figure is composed of some parts, like a doll in a muppet show, or like a composition of some elements cut out from cardboard. The images - though they are captured in drawing - are sculptural, dignified and silent. Soon, yielding to their meaningful silence, the artist will endow them with spacious measure of forms carved in stone. Faces will be built of contours which some texturally varied planes try to fit into. They are hidden by veils which become the substance of the face itself (and the personality). Sometimes they are chiselled by hatching that looks like scars, injured by acid which the artist uses to etch graphic plates. We feel that a genuine human being stands behind this delicate tissue and we also experience some kind of close relation with these incomplete forms. We understand that in our search for indentity we are often limited by our inability to capture what is unambiguous. Thus we are left - helpless and slightly confused - at the stage of incompleteness, disability and partiality. The sense of ambiguity becomes a source of doubt and raises subsequent questions about nature of our existence.

One of God's mysteries, trinity, is transferred on human beings, as if their essence was likely to be comprehended only by understanding and uniting all their hypostases. Profiles aimed at different directions, located in a variety of positions on a plane of the image - and in the space of life - allow to mark various relations of humans with themselves and with other people. Tracing down the evolution of these relations, according to the method of critical biographism, might probably result in conclusion concerning the artist herself. We are struck by the lack of directly expressed emotions and feelings in the images - at least those represented by means of conventional face expressions and gestures. Undoubtedly the works refer to them, yet the imagery elements become only their sign, their expression. However, they certainly mean it since the works were cerated as a response to some specific experiences and situations, and they present the evolution of the artist's awareness.

The form building the human silhouette has also its independent function. Compositions of patches on the plane associated with the course of drawing lines compose the well-sensed autonomic artistic value. The selection of graphic techniques, those which require strong surface interference and those which - like the soft-ground etching or the monotype - do not allow the artist to fully control the matter, leaving a margin of ambiguity and uncertaity, perfectly matches the issues the artist is concerned with. The world presented in the works is plain. It is merely a figure or a few figures surrounded by simple, easily recognized objects, often having some symbolic references. Incomplete or distorted silhouettes are placed in the space hard to define, deprived of any characteristic features. The objects are hidden in shades and under-exposures. Due to this endeavour the graphic works sound like visual nocturnes. A human being - deprived of their realistic detailed context and presented without any specific or individual traits - obtains the value of a symbol. Avoiding a description, going away from any literal or complicated narrative intensifies the sense of emotional truth. In her works the artist gradually transfers from what is individualised in the awareness of identity and is subject to continuous evolution through considerations referring to human relationships and up to some general universal reflections, to the ontology of human existence.

First come individuality and space. What is interesting here is the fact that the artist, in her written papers, talks about the characters of her works in the third person singular. She is aware of the fact that the access to the subject - the return to I - is never direct; it is always somehow indirect and can not go without mediation and interpretation. The result of such an effort - as far as the artist is concerned - is an attempt to repress, or to understand her own (uncertain?) feminine identity. In a wider perspective it can also be treated as an expression of the cultural position of a woman, symbolized by orders and concealment. Another aspect refers to people and their mutual relationships - the space of a dialogue (or its attempts) and its metamorphoses. That dialogue is sometimes made on the basis of inconsistent conditions, without criss-crossing responses - frequently without mouths, without the right to speak, in a torn statement made by a torn face. Tension arises from the sense of the essence of various relations, from passions, potential spiritual communiacation. And finally she discovers universal values, mainly ethical ones which can not be individually categorized. The space in which the artist continues her search is the space of a dialogue that goes beyond the purely human nature. The artist's considerations take place in the space where the encounter with transcendence is likely to happen, where it is possible to realize to what extent we are able to reach what we consider to be sacrum, no matter what name we give to it.

The artist discovers new ways of cognition. She finds them out in the state of self-awareness. This is the condition of going beyond the limits of profanum. It does not always occur to us to believe that we can achieve it in a lonely journey. Then we turn to those chosen - to the scribes and sages, to priests and prophets - mediators who are ‘God's voice on the Earth'. In Tamara Sass's work the man is the active subject (thoughtful - as first of all 'I am and I think') and the suffering subject (e.g. suffering from solitude or unfulfillment). Acting and suffering play an important role in the process of building the individual identity, emerging from the life experience. Our immersing in culture brings further consequences for the man's attempts to define themselves and to understand their relations with reality. The world is a miscellany of elements of culture, testimonies of historical tradition, manifestations of social conditions - revealed in a variety of texts. The knowledge concerning the man and the world which surrounds us is expressed by means of a language. In culture, in the language of art, the man melts into the world of symbols. Tamara Sass takes advantage of the symbols of culture too ('The Last Supper'). In her works however, she does not imitate the culturally accepted and preserved iconographic motif, but she intererprets it from the perspective of the phenomenon of common perception.

The artist realizes the fact that the man's image has always conveyed meanings embodying Beauty, Truth, Knowledge. The man would impersonate cardinal qualities, being also the reflection of the ideal divine harmony, like in Leonardo's case and his scheme of human body's proportions or the Renaissance comparisons of the man and his personality to (human) architecture endowed with perfection. Nowadays, when the man is frequently deprived of dignity, and even more often blends in homogenized cultural pulp - the human image, homo decor, falls apart like a sand sculpture. Instead of looking for human sacrum, we often simply place the man in the catalogue of symbols of the contemparary world. Meanings which should explain the sense reach the limit of banality. In the artist's creation culture interference (in the opposition culture - nature) is manifested in the form of introducing geometrical, regular and complete elements into the imperfect presented world. Gifted with colour (as some of the graphic works require red accents, like a bloody tear flowing down the cheek) they scream in discords with monochromes of corporal biological forms.

One of Tamara Sass's works is titled 'The Tree of Knowledge'. Picking the fruit from that tree, the man rebelled against God's order and at the same time he marked human existence with the sin. Questioning the supernatural order - he simultaneously manifested his free will. Following it, he looks for the truth, about himself and about the world. Discovering the state of affairs, on the one hand he tames and on the other hand he increases the existential anxiety. In her works Tamara Sass presents her own personal philosophy - she discovers herself and builds up the sense of self-understanding.

Dariusz Leśnikowski

Translated by Elżbieta Rodzeń-Leśnikowska