Organism 114 (from the Cross-sections cycle)

Even the first contact with the works of Irmina Staś is enough to turn the current of associations towards that part of natural life which is invisible to the naked eye. The rounded, bisected forms shown in her painting Organism 114 bring to mind microbes, blood corpuscles or cells  perceptible only thanks to the magnifying power of the microscope. The trickles of paint oozing down the canvas resemble pseudopodia, cilia, nerve endings. Staś seems fascinated with the world of organic matter: its amorphousness and its unbridled nature, its vitality and the slow but inexorable arrival at the end of a life cycle. Yet her works have little in common with scientific representations of reality; her bisected “organisms” constitute far-reaching transformations of specimens fixed on microscope slides. In those evident syntheses, Staś is seeking an elementary particle of life, an analogue to the materia prima.
 
In terms of composition and the manner of depiction, Staś’s works are close to medical plates or illustrations in botanical and zoological compendia, with which they share the neutral backgrounds, making it possible to extract the anatomical structures or specimens of fauna and flora from any geographical, historical or cultural context. This offers an illusory possibility to create an objective image, one that belongs to the sphere of universal knowledge. Yet Staś’s works in no way conform to the claim of objectivity; on the contrary, they reveal its utopian character. Her cross-sections are literal; but their form results from artistic negotiations with the world as perceived by senses. In seeking her own conception of an image, Staś started with realistic representations of nature in order to go through a stage of recreating it from memory and finally arrive at an allusive abstraction that shows not real entities but their after-images.
 
The critics look for the origins of Staś’s oeuvre in varying, occasionally contradictory currents. Her “artistic genealogical tree” (Paweł Polit) is very complex, some of its branches growing out of the Constructivism of the pre-war builders of the new order, from the post-war Surrealism, from Art Informel and from Colourism, rooted in the explorations of the Kapists. The legacy of all these currents is indeed present in her works; it seems, however, that in an area delimited by the rational order and the expressive colour, she herself finds herself the most comfortable with the very act of painting; an act which is a transmutation of her subjective perception and recognition of reality.