Identification as Process

Identification as Process

Katarzyna Badach extracts images from her environment in which the joy of vision is inseparable from a highly singular compassion with the stubbliness of human efforts to find a home in the world.
Her focus lies on “absurd human gestures” (Badach) in urban space, with which people seek to improve their surroundings, more or less successfully: absurd decorations, redesigns or imitations of nature. Badach paints pictures that rehabilitate these interventions of humans against the shortcomings of their world as absurd human drudgery in the face of reality, and that attribute a metaphorical power to them. In decay and neglect, she finds small resurrections of aliveness, in desolate sceneries she envisions stars, suns and horizons. Sources of light and transcendencies that outshine and surpass the image of quotidian life. With desperate elation, she portrays places and objects that speak of desires and alienation, of the redundancy of the right life.
Her large-format oil paintings are preceded by a gradual process of the painterly internalization and adaptation of visual experience. Each picture starts outdoors. She is not afraid to expose herself to the sites of her paintings, even if they are no idylls. She settles down on site for a while, and begins to take hold of the space, with oil sketches and oddly dry watercolors. Weather and events influence her work, but the key factor comes from her: her color sense. There is no typical Badach-tonality, no basic color, an individual palette develops in each painting.
KatarzynaBadach is a fundamentalist of color vision; she captures her view of things exclusively as a fabric of color on a surface. Actual spatial structures are transferred into color structures. She does not need object edges or contours in order to absorb a place into her imagination, only pieces of color next to flecks of color. Some prospects seem as if they were built out of building blocks of color, stacked or heaped up out of chromatic luminous forms, one building block could be a whole house, or many little blocks could join to form foliage or clouds. The inner connectivity of the structure always follows the laws of the plane. The leaves are often arranged strangely vertically, as if the act of painting were constructing an airy wall of color. Spatiality is established as pure color depth, just enough as necessary in order to understand the relationship between things. We are in a world in which the illusion of space would be a betrayal of the reality of the picture; we are within painting.
A unique texture that foregoes illusionist figuration lies in the composition, a blocky color-building. The real things are far away, but the chromatic paintbrush-things are pushed, nudged, stacked in piles and side by side.
Simultaneously to the adaptation of the seen as a color construct, the gestural adaptation of seen things takes place. Color lies in the light and the eye; you can’t blame anything for it, not a tree, not a trash can, not a sunset. In the world that we came from to here, in which KatarzynaBadach’s large-format oil paintings return as conclusions of an identification process, an intense empathization, to the splendidly wretched world, color always does appear on objects. When objects are supposed to have a voice as actors or vehicles of a painting’s narrative again, colors must take shapes that at least resemble objects. And when it comes to shapes, it gets personal. In rendering the figurative color-shapes, the movement of color-material on the canvas becomes a personal form of touching, approaching, assessing the portrayed objects and their relationships. Gestures grow into things. One can imagine KatarzynaBadach giving the painting suggestions for its reality, trying out gestures that will do justice to its objects and suit her as well: Not as a mirror image, but a gestural correlate concocted on her own, as the analogy of a tree’s movement, a gust of wind or a gradient from light to shadow. It is no coincidence that she paints walls with painterly signs of deterioration, which already recall abstract and gestural painting in real life: real (mural) images that seem to have been painted by an impersonal reality. It is out of these scars of dilapidation, crumbling plaster, water stains and broken windows, that her eye creates the aforementioned stars and horizons. The planar motifs of her wall-abstractions are set in the image like canvases on a canvas, they provide a graphic framework of traces for a completely color-dependent color-believer, a painter who says she can only draw with a brush. If relation to the world and gestural expression merge, there’s no need to shy away from the picturesque.
The process of artistic creation is concluded in the seclusion of the studio, and on a large scale. The paintings have become personal, the objects re-emerge from abstraction into the light, and with them all the slouching misery at its most beautiful. The things in the painting have become character-objects, things with a gestural personality. Reflections of reality have become interior impulses, things identified with a sense of self and world, which—as personal impulses—call for more gestural scope than the notation of the impressions they derive from. This is no longer just the sunlight, but a personal radiation, which seeks to mediate itself corporeally. In a life-size based on her own body, derived from her movement in front of the canvas, KatarzynaBadach performs the picture as a closed gestural nexus and imparts it with an individual narrative.
There is no spiritual waste separation with Badach, no special dumpster for objectivity, no hazardous waste container for the emotional. The interior. The soul is full of the world, and the world is never without self. KatarzynaBadach deliberately saturates her soul with the world. When one views her image trajectories from the first sketch to the fully formulated oil painting, painting comes into view as a method of identification, emotional rapport as tangible work, which one must be ready to take on.

Jens Nippert, Berlin 2015