PUBLICATIONS

 

Redefining space.

 

A few words about the exhibition and the artist…

The artistic works of Natalia Kozieł – just like her personality

– are extremely expressive, emotional and dynamic. Native

Bydgoszcz resident, graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in

Gdańsk and the Finnish University of the Arts in Helsinki,

she draws spectators into the world of her own experiences,

sophisticated impressions, unforgettable events.

Coming from traditional easel painting and large-format

drawings, through textile, she went with the passage of

time onto the side of graphic art, light installations and

projections, making use of technical achievements – both

old and the latest. Thanks to them, she combines painting

poetics and printing language. She experiments with film

material, creating pictures directly on film. And she doesn’t

limit herself to this...

The circle of her interests includes also the artistic phenomenon

called live cinema1, being a peculiar extended performance,

a theatrum absorbing spectators completely.

Switch on button – this is the latest work of art of Natalia

Kozieł, being a part of the series of projection-collages, to

which the young artist devotes special attention currently.

The silent heroes of the Bydgoszcz exhibition are old

slide projectors, graphoscopes and 16mm film projectors,

which have nothing to do with modern and expensive digital

devices. The fascination with the charm of oldish machines

puts the artist on the list of contemporary conceptual

creators, who cannot imagine art without more or less

complicated optical devices. Just like Ceal Floyer, Bruce

Conner and Krzysztof Wodiczko, Natalia appreciates artistic

and spatial possibilities and the power of the social impact

of the so-called ”slide pictures”. Film projectors and slide

projectors – as she says – operate as recorders of points.

 

 

1 This concept refers to the contemporary, extensive narrative technique based on

the co-existence and interpenetration of motion picture, music and performative

elements created by artists in real time and within a uniform, closed space with

the participation of spectators. Live cinema is characterised by departure from traditional,

often linear narration built by means of a movie camera or a photo camera,

for a much broader artistic concept in presenting individual forms and phenomena;

Mia Makela, The Practice of Live Cinema, http://miamakela.net/TEXT/

text_PracticeOfLiveCinema.pdf (access: 06.07.2016).

 

 

They are always visible. They declare that there is something that

one can see, and with their strong beam of light they indicate

places often ignored […] A projection calls spectators to switch

the points of reference, and the sound of machines working non

stop additionally strengthens the intensity of emotions2.

In all projections – Space – seems to be the element, which

influences the character of screened material. Existing, and

then re-evaluated, on the one hand it specifies the frames for

multiplied two and three-dimensional pictures, and on the

 

other hand it allows to see the world of artistic experiments

and aesthetic raptures of the artist. Extended visualisations,

absorbing successive walls and ceilings of museum space

(Vantaa Art Museum), gallery (Kuva Tila; Ksarminkatu),

municipal cinema, or the old Helsinki factory Suvilahti, open

up new horizons, and successive interpretation systems. From

the darkness of industrial architecture, light is born. Darkness

wraps a quiet, white exhibition room. Each corner is filled with

some unreal picture. The abstract form based on the internal

coexistence of black and white is completed sometimes with

interpenetrating layers of colours – red, yellow, blue. Numerous

lines, slight lines, broad bars, dense marks, structures close to

bridges, roofs or geometrised chimneys are the victory of the

abstract world. This is the result of exploring the nature of the

smallest things, to which we usually pay no attention. I guess

everything started from a simple change in the perspective

of vision – the artist says – from looking at things and events

around me, which with the passage of time transformed into

greatly free and enormously pleasant strong staring. A simple

change, in which I quickly forgot about the natural position

of standing on two legs and looking straight ahead. I became

fascinated with the perspective of a stool or a shoe. Since then,

strongly bent down, I’ve been finding things, stories happening

down there, close to the floor, which actually few people take a

look at...3.

In especially generated spaces, Natalia focuses on bringing

closer different dimensions. She opens up the matter of a

graphic body and brings closer the dimension of the matter of

print. Building her projections, she gathers the original space of

a given place in order to use it the way she wants. In all this, she

combines still picture and moving picture, dynamics and statics,

matter and emptiness.

 

 

2 Natalia Kozieł (conversation with Piotr Wąsowski), 05.07.2016.

3 Natalia Kozieł (conversation with Piotr Wąsowski), 05.07.2016.

 

 

Besides space, time plays an important role. According

to some theories, time and space are not objects existing

independently of things and on a par with them, but they are

relations between bodies. In the art of Natalia Kozieł, time and

space are independent only towards the things on the outside.

They are the result of mutual co-occurrence and concurrence,

also with bodies of still technical devices. The factor of time is to

me an important and inseparable element of projection. Maybe

because I am equally interested in failures and coincidences and

in success […] I do not think about traces in the creation process.

I rather give them a chance to happen, just as I also allow slide

projectors and film projectors to interact4.

Spectators are an organic part of each projection – everyone

admiring, contemplating, and taking delight in the things

we call art. Entering the Gallery space redefined by Natalia,

we surrender to a completely new situation, in which the

traditional relation between work of art and spectator is

disturbed. Taught by the example of large museums, accustomed

to looking at an unlimited line of paintings on the wall,

she forces us to be an integral part of a projection. Willingly

or unwillingly, we come into the world of her internal

experiences – and even we enrich this world by casting our

own silhouettes on multiplying visualisations. We form the

new context, extremely interesting to both the significance

of the entire work and the artist herself.It is important to me

to create a space, in which people can behave as spontaneously

as possible!5 – she says with a smile.

In the exposition, the projection is completed with a collection

of black and white graphics made with the use of the

carborundum technique6. Not large but charming. Seemingly

tranquil, but rapacious. Delicate, but strong in their expression.

 

 

4 Natalia Kozieł (conversation with Piotr Wąsaowski), 14.07.2016.

5 Natalia Kozieł (conversation with Piotr Wąsowski), 14.07.2016.

6 Carborundum (silicon carbide) – a crystalline compound of silicon and carbon

prepared by melting in electric furnace at a temperature of 2000°C. In lithography,

it is used as grinding material in the form of grinding powder with the use

of rolls and whetstones as tools. Carborundum is also the name of a specific, experimental

graphic technique consisting in spreading gesso acrylic paint, mixed

with corundum powder, on metal plate. Recesses on print are convex material

on matrix. An advantage of this technique is abundance of marks and reliefs

that remain on a ready print, and a disadvantage – no possibility of getting large

editions from one matrix. By multiple running through a printing press, small

grains of carborundum are crushed, and thus a picture disappears. A characteristic

feature of carborundum print is also lesser time consumption of work,

as opposed to traditional techniques that require matrix etching; Gerald W. R.

Ward (ed.), The Grove Encyclopedia of Materials and Techniques in Art, New York,

2008, pg. 83.

 

 

They will delight everyone who finds courage to look at them.

Their abstract-expressive poetics seems to correspond with

the oil achievements of Franz Kline and other American art

classics. Temperamental, far from precise etchings, they

approach more gestural painting. They function as younger

sisters of monumentalised projections screened on the

Gallery walls. Their workshop nature, though limited by the

space of a white sheet, penetrates somehow into the graphic

world based on diapositive technology. These tiny, square

carborundum prints make us aware of how tradition and new

media intermingle. And finally, how contemporary narration

is born and how classical perception decays.

 

Switch on button – a unique exhibition.

Switch on button – a space combining graphic art, theatre and film.

 

Piotr Wąsowski

 

exhibition curator