THE POSTMODERNIST ANGEL IN PARADISE  

The necessity of religious experiences expresses the everlasting trials to find a meaning and an explanation of the world. A significant area of art originates from the lack of lawful knowledge about the order of temporality around us on the one hand and a desire to find a secure formula of the world on the other. Art order cannot give us a full answer to our doubts. But art can help us to tame our longing and remind about its permanent nature.

Danuta Krupska-Solowiej's art is an uncommon case of balance between painting considered as an esthetical pleasure and art full of symbolic and unexpected events. The seemingly eclectic and delicate world in her pictures is in fact very strong and stable. Almost abstract compositions are very geometrical and they are very often based on the central structures. The colors are rather pastel-like and she puts them in an ephemeral way. The surface of canvases is lusterless. Within her paintings we can differentiate two streams. The streams are not in opposition but they complete each other.  

The most representative for the first group are the pictures with semi-organic or biological forms like: flowers, shells, stones and simplified shapes resembling: fountains, pools or garden paths. The best examples of such pictures are: "Arranging of the heaven IV", "Arranging of the heaven VI" or "Arranging of the heaven V". The compositions of these pictures are well-knitted and built on vivid rhythms reminding musical phrases. Softness and etherealness of the way she paints is underlined by the contrasts of strong geometrical shapes of rhombuses, squares and rectangles. The mentioned pictures may be associated with an idyllic idea of a garden or a space designed for reposing and contemplation. There we find a slightly melancholic yearning for a perfect world. This is the world like in The Garden of Eden or oriental gardens from Japan, Alhambra (The court of Lions), or gardens from Shekerezada's tales. These associations come automatically. The artist very often bases the compositions of her pictures on a central axial point. It is related to the attempts of building the harmonious structures within a closed area. The sizes of the pictures are relatively big and it lets us nearly enter into the painted garden. The pictures reflect the artist's imagination written on a two-dimensional surface of the canvas. It may seem we face a vibrating and living world. It is a very sensual and uncommon way of touching art.

All the pictures from the second group have equal sizes and shapes. They are all squares. The colors are more decisive and they lost their lightness. They are very graphic and put in a flat way. The color in these pictures is more intensive and is conformed to iconography. It serves to underline a meaning of the picture. Its role is less connected with the esthetic than with the meaning and a message given by the artist. The most representative for the group are pictures like: "An Angel and Robocop in the common heaven V", "An Angel and Robocop in the common heaven III", "An Angel and Robocop in the common heaven I", "An Angel and Robocop in the common heaven II".
The iconography of the canvases is striking and sometimes astonishing. We find things which refer to religious representations; angels and figures that look like saints on the one hand and models of children's toys; Robocop, Transformers or spaceships on the other. We see a contrast between the forms of the sacral world and the pop culture's forms that mesmerizes childish imagination. The toys are usually treated like trash and when put together with the sacral, noble forms they are charged with powerful new meanings. The artist sets together theoretically very different worlds and cultural codes within a frame of one cohesive space. The fantastic-infantile childish imagination and the mystic imagination of adults live there in the same neighborhood. The strong construction of pictures makes the coexistence peaceful and without any dissonance. In that way the artist reveals that perhaps our matured desires and attempts to understand the world and its order are not very different from childish, naive trials. It seems that our amazement towards the world and the attempts to find an optimal place and sense is not subordinated to a banal intervention of time. Perhaps the naivety of a matured person is the same like the naivety of a child. There is a planet in the center of the picture "An Angel and Robocop in the common heaven VI". The planet is enclosed by the arms of four angels and encircled by two blue transformers. Surely the planet is not aware of external powers and eventual threats. It is protected just like our daily life is protected by the buffer of culture, the only stable and reliable factor that maintains it.  

Unpretentious and superbly composed pictures of Danuta Krupska-Solowiej remind us in a subtle and simultaneously suggestive way that the art and the culture are conditions of our harmonious existence. The way we tame nature in the area of a garden is a manifestation of the culture and so is security provided by the world of children's heroes and the world of religious symbols of adults. Without the area of the culture and the art it is risky to ask a question and it would be unreasonable to expect any answer.

Dariusz Glowacki