September 13 – October 18
Through his painting, Jakub Słomkowski poses a question related to this idea: to what extent is our reality defined by the fairy tales we know from childhood? In other words, how does Baba Yaga operate within us, even after we have crossed the threshold into adulthood? In the beginning there was a stone and a piece of wood. Not much, although enough to construct new, separate worlds. One of these simple objects represented seemingly passive, inanimate matter; the other, an active force of living nature. Together, they became part of a fairy-tale story about eternal returns.
The exhibition opens with quasi-portrait depictions of a stone and a tree trunk, protagonists of everyday experience—objects so ordinary and commonplace that their presence would not normally arouse particularly strong emotions in us. And yet there are realities in which both a piece of solidified lava and a fragment of a dead tree become laden with symbolic meanings and begin to lead metaphorical lives.
Behind every stone painted by Jakub Słomkowski lies an unspoken story of the previous life of a temporarily immobilised protagonist. Yet at first glance, it is clear that the Warsaw artist ’ s painting distances itself from the stereotypical colour palette of fairy tales—the proverbial “fairy- tale vividness.” In keeping with the fairy tale’s penchant for contrasts, Jakub Słomkowski juxtaposes meticulously refined passages of drawing, characterised by an almost copperplate-like linearity, with wonderfully painterly areas of colour, modulated with astonishing subtlety and skill. Memory transforms the stones and tree trunks we remember, placing them in new contexts; imagination connects them with other objects, creating ever richer stories. Of course, the stories that live within us rarely find expression in words. Perhaps it is therefore easier for an image to express the twisted logic of the looping time of memory and symbolic thought.
Through his paintings, Jakub Słomkowski thus asks: to what extent is our reality defined by the fairy tales we know from childhood? In other words — how does Baba Yaga operate within us, even after we have crossed the threshold into adulthood?
As the Romanian philosopher and historian of religion Mircea Eliade wrote, “symbolic thinking is not the exclusive property of the child, the poet or the psychopath: it is consubstantial with human existence—it precedes language and discursive reason. ”It precedes language, but fortunately, as Jakub S łomkowski’ s works demonstrate, it can be framed within an image.
It is therefore in the meanders of symbolic thought that the answer to the question How does Baba Yaga work? can be found.
— Excerpt from the curator’s text by Paweł Bień.
