Emilia Wojszel

Emilia Wojszel was born in 1986 in Sokółka. In 2006, she began to study painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk, graduated from Prof. Jerzy Ostrogórski’s painting studio and digital print specialization in Prof. Cezary Paszkowski’s studio. Received her diploma in 2011 for her work entitled “I Don’t Know Why But I Don’t Like Pink Or Violet In Paintings”. Logic of reception. Perception globalization. TAKE A LOOK AT ME NOW. She is most interested in painting.

Born in 1986 in Sokółka, Emilia Wojszel defended her diploma work in 2011. To say that she is a talented painter is to say nothing. Such a young artist with such a great artistic awareness that she is able to turn into a work of art is a rarity these days. She is the type of artist who does not treat her own art as a pedestal and each gesture as final. Quite the opposite, she builds and deconstructs in hope that she will find her own way somewhere in between. She uses her own visual signature with ease, and the painting matter she touches smoothly undergoes any processing. What she does is a succession of unrestrained geometry which is only regulated by her own creative urge. She sometimes destroys her own work to put the painting in an embarrassing pose, facing the destructive act resulting from redundant meanings in order to do to the painting whatever it takes. To put it askew, hang it up the ceiling or confront with something which will disorient the viewer, who would rather see it elsewhere.

Her diploma is a modernist black line on a yellow backdrop. The juxtaposition itself, those two clashing colours, seem to find their own tangents on different trajectories. The yellow, a modernist colour, as a certain symbol, has been pulled down the pedestal of non-objective art and for Emilia Wojszel is a deconstructor of yet another modernist myth of objectivity. Seeing her works, I reflected on the way an artist relates to this myth, and again attempts to build her own language of art, full of references embedded in the web of modernist connections. Emilia Wojszel creates a network of linkages on a clean, practically meaningless cadmium yellow. The lines intersect, forming a system of tensions, to literally cut through the matter and gain objectivity, emancipated from painting space. A broadening of its meaning by remnants of the paintings cut to equal lines – stripes. Paintings which become objects and objects which become paintings, the mutual play of meanings, is a successful concept proving the great potential which painting itself still retains.      

Krzysztof Gliszczyński