Karolina Komorowska Buble

Opening: 21.01.2011, opening hour: 18.00

Open until: 11.02.2011

Looking at Karolina Komorowska’s works, what we instantly notice is the clash of two forces. Those two vectors pressing against each other seem to be the right representation of the artistic strategy she confronts us with. In her painting we will find traces of trompe l’oeil, an art technique which aim is to “deceive the eye” and create optical illusions that would confuse the viewers and make it difficult to correctly classify what they see. Photography is the key word to decode the other side of this photorealism. By meticulously “portraying” the paradoxes from her family home, the artists reveals her desire to preserve the past, even though it was not the time of financial prosperity. To make the reception of her works more challenging for us, Komorowska balances between reality and its representation. However, what is important here, is not the act of forgery itself but the item that has been forged. The artists paints “hand-painted plates”. She repeats the gesture of decorating tableware by transferring them onto canvas and reconstructing them together with the base which was originally ceramic. In other words, the role of the plate, which usually was restricted to a simple passe-partout, becomes just as important as the painted decoration. It is elevated to being the subject of the work and one of its main components. The centre and the peripheries of the painting are placed on the same level of our reception, therefore, the shape of the decorated tableware becomes the subject of the painting just as the decoration this subject is covered with…

(fragment of an essay by Piotr Pękała entitled Remains of a Meal – a Trace of a Memory or the Mythology of the Family Home)