One life*
Jolanta Dąbkowska-Zydroń The introdustion to the catalogue Grażyna Szymała-Wołyńska "ONE LIFE" selected sculptures 1986-2007
In art theory, as well as in practice, a movement described as "Art in Between" becomes more and more widespread. This type of art deals with the transitory, with the indescribable, as if the artist stopped talking. Peter Weibel says the contemporary man lives to experience the lack. He calls our time the lacking age. Such a state of affairs is caused by mechanical acceleration.**
The world Grażyna Szymała-Wołyńska opens for us, replaces this lack with a premonition of eternity implemented in specific forms of here and now. There is a reason the artist chooses wood, or tree as an ancient symbol of world’s persistence, as opposed to the fragility of our individual existences. Within this material, a mankind companion forever and ever, she finds a deeper meaning of creation, expression of eternal emotions and fears, and destiny.
The technique the sculptress uses is strict in form and free in meanings it evokes. “Three Falls of Jesus” sculpture strikes us with its simplicity. There are rectangular hewn wooden blocks that seem to break apart before our very eyes, portraying the burden of the Passion. A metal slab the blocks are placed on acts as a passé-partout⎯and much more. In many Grażyna’s sculptures, metal, heavy and stable, seems to keep the composition in balance, to fix it, to ground it⎯to assign it to the Earth. The sculptures connect the world of ideas with the material world. The energy emanated by these simple, ascetic forms seem to flow both from extraterrestrial spaces and the terrestrial ones.
The burden on the Christ’s arms is also the burden of all the people carrying their cross, and the cracks in the wooden plaques become the shadow of the Way of the Cross, in the Bible, as well as in human life. The emotional dimension of the “Three Falls” is not only tragic, but also cognitive as, to quote Theodor W. Adorno, “Cognition has no light other than given to the world by the salvation, all the rest is used up in imitational construction and remains a piece of technique.”***
Visual ambiguity tenses up also another sculpture, “Good and Evil”. Two parallel unseasoned planks is divided by a naturally irregular crack that narrows and widens, and flows in a delicate rhythm beyond the boundaries of the sculpture. There, the wood almost stops the flow, but the delicate light let in in the middle cannot be stopped. But there is also another kind of light present, bright, silvery, but clearly marked lines, intersecting one another in the optical center of the piece, within the space occupied by the crack. Where do they come from? Where do they go? They continue with tapes mounted next to the piece. We cannot actually be sure where they end. If we cannot see them anymore, does it mean there is no continuity? Uncertainty, premonition, intuition, like the title good and evil. There is neither absolute good, nor absolute evil, one cannot exist without the other. They form a strange antinomy. One gives value to the other, as the positive enhances the negative and vice versa.
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