A Cell of the Eye

Barbara Kasprzycka’s A cell of the eye is located within the tradition of links between art and medicine. As examples, it is necessary to mention artists studying anatomy by dissecting corpses, illustrators of anatomical atlases, or makers of wax sculptures of human bodies with visible internal organs. For a long time, works of this type remained on the margins of the fine arts. Écorchés, i.e. medical illustrations and sculptures, anatomical models made of wax, wood or bone, have been re-read and appreciated relatively recently thanks to the research of the British historian Ludmila Jordanova and the groundbreaking exhibitions The Quick and the Dead (1999) and Spectacular Bodies (2000). In Poland, research by Zofia Ameisenowa (1962) was pioneering in this area.

Kasprzycka worked on A cell of the eye at a time when, on the Polish art scene, the relationship between art and medicine was being explored by representatives of the so-called critical art. Installations, films and photographs by artists such as Artur Żmijewski, Grzegorz Klaman and Konrad Kuzyszyn constituted statements about medicine, its relationship to the individual, and the human body. Kasprzycka’s stance is different; The cell of the eye is, paradoxically, closer to works created in modern art than to the explorations of her contemporaries. What links her oeuvre to the works of the old masters is her admiration for the phenomenon of life and for what is invisible to an eye not armed with specialised apparatus.

Kasprzycka’s painterly considerations have no scientific basis. Droplets of paint flowing through each other create suggestive visions of optically magnified cells, but ones far removed from actual microscopic images. Kasprzycka’s fascination with this small form can be compared to the fascination of nineteenth-century scientists with the images that appeared through the achromatic lens of a microscope. The traditional “wet-in-wet” painting method she had adopted in combination with an unconventional painting support (acrylic glass) and atypical stained glass paints, the multiple application of layers of paint until they thicken, and the observation of the behaviour of the merging drops, all contribute to her private record of the experience of transformation, “a description of the phenomenon of life, and not only human life; of the moment of its creation”.

[…] The zones covered by Kasprzycka’s work are about addressing the phenomenality of parts, or – more accurately – particles, in a sense extracted from the whole of the organism, heretowith invisible and, thus, unknown to the eye, an aspect which invariably makes for increased fascination. The beauty of strangeness, of otherness tickles our fancy with the question of whether these are our own cells or bits of usurpative nothingness. Still together, or already apart…

These slides are the carries of the verdict. They have the power of deciding over the whole left behind, i.e. about a specific, individual person. It for this reason they have been separated.

Until the result has been announces, we remain hostages to this fragment. This can always happen. All our life. One can never be sure. But, in compensation, there is the beautiful form in its certainty, a beautiful view, like a landscape. Changeable. The miracle of biological inscription under the guise of a blotch which, where seemingly a fixed composition, is subject to the process of change. The process of painting itself continues, and there also the consequences of amplifying the presence of the shape by the materials employed.

Transmogrifications of hope, i.e. of the still-possible state of vivisection in lieu of the terminal gamble of protracting the days of existence.

The microstructure carries a recorded model for the whole, but first and foremost – to the naked eye – this is only a coloured blotch. It gains a new quality outside of the organism.

It splashes to and fro underneath the glass panel, for a moment it retains the temperature of the organism from which it has been taken as the “sample”. That’s how our organic signature is, sometimes we do not know how and why it came to pass the way that it did. The mystery of life… Later it will be rendered in the record of rows of numbers in tables. It testifies to the state of our preservation, be it good or bad. […]

The red grove of shapes in the works of Barbara Kasprzycka (red being the colour most prevalent in her pieces) pertains to the tangible, ephemeral phenomena of life, it is her fascination by the process of painting. It is her calling up of her own landscapes – of views reminiscent of cells, of the occasional body cavity, of living swarms, of cocoons of beginning. […]

The emission of colour and light denoting a unique record of that which was and that which can be in a moment by the actions of a given individual is a pinned-down moment of the life fore. It could also be that the hope for greater acceptance for these varicoloured bumps and ruts of the cerebral cortex is also meant to incorporate, apart from fascination, a bit of understanding for the shine and gloom of a single life.

Of its unforeseeability and its routine.

An excerpt from the essay ‘Scraps of Life. Together or Apart’ by Maria Morzuch, published in the exhibition catalogue Barbara Kasprzycka. Proces, Galeria Arsenał, Białystok 2001
 

The private studies carried out by Kasprzycka are devoid of any scientific foundations. Drops of paint, permeating each other, only create significantly processed (in comparison to the realistic microscopic blow-ups) but suggestive images, evoking associations with enlarged cells. The artist’s delight with this relatively minute form can only be compared to the admiration that 19^th c. scientists felt towards what they saw with the help of an achromatic lens of a microscope. The traditional method of “wet in wet” (on a non-conventional painting surface – Plexiglas, and using non-conventional stained glass paints) adopted by the artist, the numerous layers of paints, spread gradually one on top of the other until they become thick, the observation of the merging drops, are all Kasprzycka’s record of experiencing change, a “description of the phenomenon of life, and not just human life, the moment of its beginning…”

Izabela Dzioba
translated from Polish by Ewa Kanigowska-Gedroyć

Excerpt from the essay ‘Mniejszy świat. Sztuka, nauka i obrazowanie mikrokosmosu’ [The smaller world. Depicting microcosm in art and science] by Izabela Dzioba, published in: Archeus. Studia z Bioetyki i Antropologii Filozoficznej, no. 5, 2004, p. 92.