Statement

Statement

My work is an appropriation of urban space by means of painting. In outlying districts and forgotten corners of cities watercolours emerge in the encounter with things commonly regarded as unappealing. Together with the inner impressions left behind by what has been seen, these form the basis of large format oil paintings.

The starting point of the works is the search for place. The anthropologist Marc Augé defines a place as allowing its identity, relationships and history to be read by the viewer. He suggests that locations in which such a reading is not possible be called non-places. Non-places originate in the logic of production, rooted in technological reasoning and profitability. This logic denies the usability of space which it has not created. The result is the proliferation of public space which is neither distinctive nor complex and the growing disappearance of places in western societies.

I am interested in the way in which urban places, often in paradoxical ways, mix remainders of nature with the human desire to create beauty – often in the form of imitations of nature. In general my paintings are also based on the personal desire to recreate the experience of beauty felt in the contemplation of nature.

I am excited by the fact that by looking we have the power to transform a thing into something else, thereby creating a new reality. For me painting is a generator of value, which allows us to fix hold of this process and increase its potency. In this way I can find the sun and stars within the dilapidated and ruined. The treatment of such motifs in painting is for me a form of sublimation of visual experience. I use the medium as if it were a type of alchemical process, an experimental procedure, the result of which cannot be predicted, in which the object of my perception undergoes change, as do I along with it.

The watercolours painted in situ are recordings of my immediate perception, and free of any stylistic intent. They allow me to approach the motifs in a way otherwise impossible. Slowly scanning them with the eyes enables me to forget my preformed mental images of them and to discover a previously unknown spectrum of forms and colours. It is these which I access and employ in the work of the oil paintings. In turn, each oil painting is an investigation into how the perceived can be translated by the most appropriate handling of the way in which paint is applied to the canvas.

Katarzyna Badach