Suzie Wal­she

The first thing one notices about Ewa Wrobel’s paint­ings is the rich­ness of their color, and the sec­ond, the pecu­liarly archaic char­ac­ter of her dynamic fig­ures. In Look­ing for Aura, Wro­bel uses the clas­sic por­trait as a vehi­cle to explore form, color and shape. These ele­ments are explic­itly the sub­ject of the paint­ing and given equal empha­sis. The dynamic rela­tion­ship between the forms is empha­sized by the inten­sive out­lines and flat unmixed color forms. Recently her palette has become increas­ingly vibrant. Bright pas­sages of color are vig­or­ously applied in seem­ingly spon­ta­neous brush­strokes. How­ever in actu­al­ity Wro­bel plans her com­po­si­tions very delib­er­ately accord­ing to for­mal prin­ci­ples, the work cre­ates a type of visual sound through patches of lines and color—the work is made to lis­ten to.

In Inti­macy Por­trait, for instance the paint­ings are char­ac­ter­ized not only by the lay­er­ing of paint, but by the fluid move­ment of color across the sur­face at great speed and out­lined in intense reds, and oranges. The sub­tlety of the images is one of a sev­eral exquis­itely sen­si­tive lay­ered works that Wro­bel has pro­duced more recently. The del­i­cately incised lines of this work, drawn over washes of color evoke clouds of ambi­gu­ity. Even in her abstract works the fig­ure is not amor­phous or form­less. The images are just frag­ments extracted from their fig­u­ra­tive con­text. Wro­bel uses line, not so much as a means of rep­re­sen­ta­tion, but in a more abstract way, to express feel­ings and moods; retain­ing the notion that the artist role is to sug­gest, not define. The process of paint­ing is an inten­sive almost per­for­ma­tive act for the artist.

The paint­ings have a vis­ceral punch that obvi­ates decon­struc­tive analy­sis, in this series; Wro­bel employs uni­ver­sally under­stood images to cre­ate com­plex per­cep­tual expe­ri­ences. The image and con­cept are dra­mat­i­cally jux­ta­posed and poet­i­cally struc­tured in an attempt to heighten sen­sory expe­ri­ence, and in some cases to call it into ques­tion. Wro­bel is con­cerned with mak­ing the spec­ta­tor aware of the con­nec­tions between body and mind, con­tem­pla­tion and action, inner and outer real­ity deal­ing with themes of per­cep­tion, mem­ory, and self-knowledge. The jux­ta­po­si­tion of the illu­sory and the tan­gi­ble extends the range of our read­ing of the work time and again.