Altea Leszczyńska
Paintings presentred here are fragments of two cycles: "Skinned" and "In the dark"
and have been inspired by the theory of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler.
A body stripped of skin is no longer physically attractive and unites the interior
and exterior spheres. It crossed the boundaries between physicality and psyche, between
the visually attractive and repulsive areas. This way the traditional relations between
the observer and the object are being transgressed. The painter presents in a simple and
symbolic manner things that rouse a feeling of aversion: blood, intestines, mucus.
Some of the presented works have been inspired by the paintings of such famous artists
as Botticelli, Degas or Matisse. However on their works the body is shown as a sexual
object whereas on Leszczynska's paintings the body is deprived of anything that may make
it desirable. More over all the bodies stripped of the exterior shield look alike,
the barriers of race, denomination or sexual orientation disappear. A skinned human body
is only and more than a symbol, that is why the figures are not painted too precisely.
Such technique emphasises the conventionality of limits which separate bodies from mind
and soul.
The painter is impressed by the human extreme emotions (like fear, joyfulness or pleasure)
or by the lack of them. The figures devoid of feelings become silent observers who look
in a provocative manner on the spectators and again the centuries-old relations between
the observer and the object are broken down. Surrealism of the presented situations
(for ex. A woman filling the sea with her own blood, a demon holding a brain in his/her hand
and a woman whose intestines are dragged by ominous birds), stresses the distance of the painter
towards the subject. The paintings desitute the pompous artificiality and pseudoartistic
pathos "speak" in a simple and comprehensive language and enforce the spectator to look
deeply inside his/her soul.
