The Wedding

Aleksandra Czerniawska’s The Wedding has a structure which is close to that of a simultaneous painting. The canvas is split into two planes: the first is occupied by a portrait of newlyweds in the company of the closest family and friends. The second displays various scenes from the wedding: the ceremony in the Orthodox church, the traditional greeting of the pair with bread, the dancing wedding quests, the orchestra, the wedding table. The artist creates an autonomous temporal space of the image, whose reality is embedded in a distant past, and which comes to us now not as a coherent narrative but as individual scenes dug out from the memory. The entire image is wrapped in a muffled pink as if an equivalent of the sepia of photographs, or varnish, which pushes the observed object even further into the past.

Czerniawska resorts to different traditions of representation. Her works reveal the esthetics of naive art, while the main characters are shown in a convention known from the production of pre-war photo ateliers. Critics point to the similarity of the artist’s imaging to the vocabulary of Andrzej Wróblewski and Marc Chagall, while the linear presentation bears references to the art of Edward Dwurnik. The eclectic style, which constructs the autonomous manner in which the presented world is built, hides more meanings. The combination of the various means of expression reveals the impossibility of coping with the subjects undertaken or presenting the problems with which the artist is trying to grapple.

Many of Czerniawska’s works constitute an “oral” history presented graphically, a painting in which the stories heard and memories reconstructed become materialized. The material used by the artist comes from her retrospective conversations with family and friends. Her paintings contain an entanglement of private experiences with the drama of history. The episodes of The Wedding are reminiscences of the tradition destroyed by the events of subsequent wars, after which nothing was the same again. The artist collects the traces which they have left, giving them a magical dimension. The Wedding has thus been situated on a stage at which we look from above. The figures captured on canvas remain frozen in the mythologized past, suspended between the tangible life in the memory and the painful quotidian absence.

Izabela Kopania