In conversation with .. 3!

herself and another person. She paints
what she cannot convey in words. Things
that inspire her are life, experiences, places,
traveling, books, and everyday life,
which she does not consider dull or monotonous.
Painting is her way of dealing
with emotions and working out the world
around her. It is closely connected to her
thought process. In one of her interviews
she stated that she would have to stop
thinking in order to stop painting.
In the series Between Us , Daria returns to
the observation of herself and others and
expands these thoughts by exploring the
subject of our relations. Between Us is not
an autobiographical exhibition, but it naturally
draws on everyday life, which presents
us with a great variety of themes: being a
person in the world, in a community, in the
family, in motherhood, in relationships, in
friendships and with oneself, and finally -
being a woman in the aforementioned universe.
There is also a subtle thread of our
relationship with nature - we are part of the
natural world and we need to connect with
it, but entangled in modernity we often forget
about it. In her paintings, Daria takes on
these subjects and the emotions associated
with them and celebrates the process, both
in the context of human experience in the
world and of her painting craft.
She portraits love stories of a couple, which
strike the viewer with sober look and maturity.
The artist gives up idealized visions in favour of an honest celebration
of love as an art of choice, compromise, working on oneself and with one
another, accepting flaws or limitations of one’s own and of others. Each
love relationship is governed by its own rhythm, we attract and disgust
each other, we set and push the boundaries, sometimes we live with each
other and sometimes next to each other, waves of passion come and go. In
such a dynamic scenery you have to be an alert observer and a participant
at the same time.
Losing oneself in relations and regaining oneself is a theme present in the
paintings dealing with motherhood, in which Pietryka persistently avoids
glorification. Her madonnas lose their heads, bodies and their own identity
for the sake of the higher purpose that is new life, new person. This very
painful aspect of women’s sacrifice, which is not talked about or considered
the natural turn of things, resounds loudly here.
The vessel of these micro and macro stories, experiences and emotions is
the body. The body is what we have and what is familiar and close to us, it
is our daily companion and personal territory, although the female body
often becomes a battlefield for entire communities. For Pietryka, the bodies
of her paintings’ subjects become the territory of research of painterly
solutions. The skin that used to be pale, stone-like and matte in her earlier
works, now takes on life and colour. Vague faces emphasize the universality
of characters and experiences present in the paintings.
Ambiguity plays an important role in the Between Us project, which is
the fruit of insightful observations and deliberations, as well as painting
experiments. Pietryka does not care about issuing opinions or commenting
on reality in a specific way. She treats her paintings more as an invitation
for the viewer to interpret freely and individually, as a feast for the
imagination; thus her works are constructed with the aim of catching our
attention. The elements of this strategy are the composition which arouses
tension and anxiety, the applied colors and their contrasts, a multidimensional
structure of the painting where one can see the paint work and
numerous interferences in the canvas, elements of collage.
Instagram @dariapietryka_atelier
daria-pietryka.com
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Between Us (Red), 80x160cm, oil on canvas, 2018