Mala Gallery
8, Zamkowy Sq., Warsaw (Old Town)
February 4-28, 2003
Patrycja Orzechowska: PHANTOMS, photography
Patrycja Orzechowska: "Phantoms"
Mala Gallery, Warsaw, February 2003
I had a dream. I dreamed that I cannot fall asleep. I was lying with my eyes open waiting for gracious Hypnos to come. Eventually images began to appear under my eyelids creating some pictures and then subsequently stories and tales but at the time of "watching" them I could not distinguish reality from a dream.
How to tell what is the real world and what is an illusion? How to separate reality from a phantom?
Patrycja had found the answer, she fathomed a mystery of the oneiric world and changed delusion into vision. By discovering her somnambulistic abilities she managed to capture within a film frame spectres, phantoms and spaces which do not exist really. She like a real sleepwalker acted in the dark and unconsciously, so she cannot reveal to us how this riddle was solved since she does not remember anything. All we can do is to admire effects of her lunatype - a personal blindfold search.
Emilia Orzechowska
Patrycja Orzechowska: "Phantoms"
Mala Gallery, Warsaw, February 2003
HANTOMS - a mysterious name always with some inherent understatement, something transitory from the world of illusion, guise and fiction. Patrycja Orzechowska creates her compositions from „Phantoms” series on the border line between the real world and her imagination. She shows human faces with emphasized expression of their eyes and places figures in cosmic-mythical environment . Almost all figures are suspended in space like in vacuum. There is some hard to define vegetation and various elements (e.g. fish, flowers) of symbolic character are accentuated. All works have in common muted blues and browns. The individual works remind short stories - but their content is difficult to describe - they are defined rather by their atmosphere which allows observer to interprete them freely. This feeling of transitoriness seems to be also a result of the artist’s own original technique she employed in this series. Orzechowska calls this technique lunatype - thus giving us a clue us at which direction should we go and what we should refer to when looking at her works.
Contemporary photography does not have to relate to reality that surround us - it can be a kind of internal relation, an attempt to communicate an artist’s own, sometimes very personal reflections on what is meaningful. It appears that photographic pictures of Patrycja Orzechowska are important to her and express what perhaps would not be so easy to deliver in words. The artist consciously created an atmosphere of tension and mystery but she also shared with us her sensitivity and need to reveal a fragment of her inner self. Even if there is certain dimension of intented convention - it is a very original and valuable way of expressing the artist’s own personality.
MG
Patrycja Orzechowska: "Phantoms"
Mala Gallery, Warsaw, February 2003
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10 - 04 - 2003
