Intimate space
Beyond their breathtaking virtuosity, Katarzyna Wiesiolek’s drawings have a disturbing, almost tactile presence.
One might be afraid of cutting oneself by grabbing one of her broken glasses or of getting dirty by sitting on her moldy plastic garden chair; one might want to pull on the cord of the blind with its misaligned slats, or repress a movement of recoil in front of a naked back bearing the mark of a bra just removed that a few strands of hair come to brush against.
But if her backs, doors, windows, planets, and bouquets are illusionary, it is not only because they are well drawn: beyond the illusion, beyond the motifs, there is matter, something that vibrates and breathes. It is almost as if the drawing sheet is like a skin.
In fact, the young Polish artist, a graduate of no less than four art schools, including the Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2018, and winner of the Prix de Dessin Pierre David-Weill in 2017, gives the materiality of drawing, its tools and supports, as much importance as the line.
She draws only with dry pigments (most often elaborated by her and varying according to each of her series), applied with her finger or sponge on leaves, the first skin of which she scrapes off to obtain a fluffy appearance.
“What is deepest in man is the skin,” said the philosopher Paul Valéry. It seems that it is this almost imperceptible depth that Katarzyna Wiesiolek tries to capture in her drawings, and in particular in her series Immanence, devoted to almost elusive apparitions:
A quest to capture the transience of these “very fragile moments,” and to perpetuate them through the material (of the drawing) that the artist pushes to the point of collecting her materials during her travels and peregrinations (stones and micro-meteorites gleaned from beaches or deserts… from which she makes her black powders and her “stardust”).
An approach to drawing that is both scientific and poetic, sensual and virtuoso, to be discovered at the Drawing Now Art Fair, which is devoting a focus to her work, concocted by the Eric Dupont gallery.
Paris – France
From 23 to 26 March
Stéphanie Dulout