Hommage à Krasiński

Karolina Zdunek makes her painting very personal. On more than one occasion, the artist has said that together with the language of geometrical abstraction, her art is like her handwriting – specific only to her, like a permanent trace of both the thought and the body. For Zdunek painterly form and painterly matter are equally important. The texture of her paintings is porous, constructed with impastos, thick layers of paint. One feels very tempted to touch the canvas. The artist steers the viewer’s perception, stimulating not only the sense of sight but also the sensors of touch. She treats painting as a value in itself. And thus, despite all the diverse formal explorations, her attitude is close to that of Leon Tarasewicz.

In her works, including the Hommage à Krasiński series, Zdunek returns to one of the most important issues often explored in the history of painting, namely, linear perspective. The artist seems to love creating illusory interiors, alleys, or never ending corridors. Her grappling with the two dimensions of the canvas situates her art in the current of painting studies rooted in the achievements of the Italian Renaissance masters. Cold calculations and mathematical rigour, however, are outside of the artist’s interests. The infiniteness of space corresponds to the feeling of melancholy, while the atmosphere of Zdunek’s images bears traits of metaphysical painting.

The reference to the art of Edward Krasiński, in particular direct associations to the blue line, so very much a part of Krasiński’s life, is not an open dialogue with his works originating from a master-student relationship. It is more due to the affinity of the artistic explorations of the two artists, for whom the utopian strive for capturing infinity seems to be a common goal. The ubiquitous blue line of Krasiński seems to find an analogy in Zdunek’s perspectives; the materiality of her canvas corresponds to that of the 19 mm wide “ScotchBlue”. The attitude of Krasiński is also close to that of Zdunek: his “life in art” means for her translating personal experiences into the seemingly cold language of geometrical abstractions and, in particular, lines running to nowhere.

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