For me, the paintings of Izabela Rajska are one of the biggest revelations this year. The artist has been exhibiting her works for only three years, and she hasn’t been awarded any significant prizes or had any spectacular achievements yet. She paints as if Maciejewski or Sasnal never existed. She doesn’t challenge post-art, art which has lost its sense. Simply – if anything here can be perceived as simple – she isn’t interested in ultra modern fads and trends; the tremors going through the slender body of contemporary art do not seem to exist for her. She is faithful to realistic and figurative painting. She paints people - portraits and acts, with great attention to detail, adding dynamism to her works with the use of chiaroscuro, as well as strong and vibrant colours. It would seem to be nothing new and yet, when I look at Izabela Rajska’s works, I feel that the purposefulness of art, so weakened in the past years, has returned; I get the impression that I am in the presence of its mysterious sense, which is about to reveal its literal meaning. Fortunately, it does not. What is covered remains covered, immersed in the shadow, from which the faces of the portrayed people emerge.
It is in this dualism (light – dark) that the strength of the artist’s works lies, in balancing on the border of what is real and rational, and what is surreal and irrational, between the literal and the metaphorical, between what is fully stated and what is understated, between the artificial and the natural. The “betweens” could be further multiplied while one tries to capture the paradoxes of Izabela Rajska’s art, treating these paradoxes as fissures for the light of sense to seep through.
The most interesting group of paintings by the Sopot artist seems to be the self-portraits, the single and the multiple, slightly stylized; the portrayed person is stuck in a costume symbolic of the orient (In the land of Jiangxi), or of the European bourgeois culture (Expecting) or the sacrum (Madonna). But the costumes are secondary. What counts is the face – serious, focused, greatly individualized. A characteristic face. Emanating power. If it expresses expectation, it is active and dynamic expectation, directed at the one who is expected. If it is humility, it is devoid of sweetness or submissiveness, it is humility which is a choice made by someone defiant.
Izabela Rajska discovers what was, until recently, treated as obvious and fundamental for the entire European philosophy. In the area of painting, the Socratic, or rather Delphic postulate to “discover oneself” is represented in the efforts given to a full reconstruction of the self. Rajska seems to be asking: “Who am I, as an individual being?” The portraits that follow are attempted answers. I have respect for art which is based on the skills of the craft, which asks vital questions, which seeks answers, art which is the result of a thought about the artist’s existence and not only about the art market and its presumed expectations.
Alongside the portraits, another group of Rajska’s paintings are works illustrating aphorisms and proverbs. They allow the author to present, as she says herself, “an absurd, irrational world” or “fantastic realism”. Such works as “Talking to a Brick Wall” “All for Sale” or especially - the most recent one, finished just before the vernissage and being the illustration of the Persian saying: “When the lion’s old, it becomes a jackals’ toy”, don’t have the loyalty to detail, so characteristic of the portraits. Here, the detail is only important to the extent that it verifies the narration or the anecdotal level of the painting. Still, you cannot run away from the face. The jackals surrounding the old lion have the faces of media personalities, and the face of the king of the animals looks very reminiscent of someone. Will any of these trends prevail? It would be bad if the author abandoned her “portrait school” for the benefit of fictionalized painted stories. The mystery hiding in the shadow is still waiting for its Ariadne.
It does not happen very often that an exhibition title fits its content so well, like a swimsuit clinging to one’s body, as is the case with Izabela Rajska’s exhibition entitled: ‘Self-portrait. Travel in time and space.’ The works really are self-portraits, in the apostolic number of 12, but the ‘apostolic’ aspect is present only in the way the exhibition has been adapted to fit the small space of the Triada Gallery in Sopot (on Monte Cassino Street) and has no evangelical meaning.
Furthermore, the self-portraits present other, culturally recognizable figures, such as a contemporary Muslim woman, a Japanese woman, an Afghan woman, a Pakistani woman. Or figures from a different epoch, for example from the author’s favourite – Renaissance, immortalized in artwork. She’s depicted as a then townswoman, an aristocrat, or the most famous of them all, Mona Lisa. It is very complicated when the painter juxtaposes the aforementioned self – a pensive one – with a diabolical self, possessing a mass of red hair. There are electrical discharges between the strands of hair.
The tension and the discharges between each of the self-portraits (both from a different time and space) and the author’s image are constant. As the artist said, this is not limited to the 12 works shown at the exhibition. The story will continue, but how long it will last the artist does not know yet. She doesn’t plan her artistic path that precisely. She loves her loyalty to detail and her subtlety of colour.
Her prior artistic occupation, demanding exceptional precision, is probably responsible for this – she was a violinist. She is educated and spent 17 years playing in the orchestra of the National Baltic Opera. Suddenly, in 2001, she decided to go back to her beloved childhood activities, such as drawing and painting. She did an extramural graduate course at the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk, where she received artistic support from professor Maria Targońska, and last year was awarded a Diploma in Painting while working under professor Henryk Cześnik.
What more could be said? It is her first solo exhibition, a continuation of her diploma theme. That much can be noticed, but another thing which can be seen is the fact that the theme is developing, achieving a metaphysical feel. It fills some places with anxiety, those places which are hidden and which are uncovered: as always, the eyes. If the trend continues, it will prove that Izabela Rajska’s decision to put away the violin and take the paint brush was the right one.
Izabela Rajska and her self-portraits
fot. Grzegorz Mehring
