Meanders of mindfulness

Elżbieta Waszczuk

From the author:

On the occasion of the 15th anniversary of my original photography gallery SAN Gallery in Kołobrzeg, I decided to celebrate it with a new photography exhibition entitled „Meanders of mindfulness”. This is a very important exhibition for me, also because in many photographs I present a painting message, and at the same time I remain faithful to photography.

Over the last few years, my world has revolved around my immediate surroundings and nature. In previous years, this world was also close to me, although the human factor also often appeared in my works.

The problem of mindfulness appears in humans over time, when we realize that many things need to be looked at from a distance. Look more carefully at things and events, finding the invisible or inscrutable in them. Make the image recorded with your eyes visible in the final image intended for the viewer. I do not intend to evoke negative emotions in the recipient of the art, I want to build in them a sense of respect for themselves and their own agency, discovering their own self in a positive context. I think that such photography could be called „psychography”, because for me the interaction between the image and the viewer is very important.

In recent years, I have been interested in the idea of showing the world not in the form of a landscape, but fragments of it. My world is a puzzle from which I’m building a landscape narrative. The fewer elements in an image, the greater its message power. The minimalism of photography triggers the imagination and allows you to mentally focus on the depth of the image.

Both color and black and white photography are important to me. It is the image itself that determines its appearance. Extracting the inscrutable from a photograph most often changes the meaning of the original image. Sometimes it reveals hidden emotions, returns to long-forgotten places or memories. What is important to me is the photography that I take for the viewer, not for art critics, although I value their opinion very much. Because for me, with photography, it’s like Zdzisław Beksiński wrote in „Day after day of life ending”:

I don’t like to represent something through something. Rather, I want to convey a certain atmosphere, mood, and I would like the painting to be liked the way you like, let’s say a symphonic poem, to be closer to something that reflects tension and does not have the content of reality translated into words. What is important is what appears to our soul, not what our eyes see and what we can name.

After 20 years of exhibiting my works at exhibitions and hundreds of face-to-face conversations with viewers, I know that exhibitions with psychological undertones are well received. The variety of images within the main theme allows for the interest of all viewers. And this is the driving force and inspiration for me in my artistic work.

To sum up, what I discover in this photograph today, I have been subconsciously doing for over a dozen years. Previously, these were single works, now there are more and more of them. This is a trend of contemporary realism that is present not only in painting, but also in photography. Altering a photograph does not mean losing its features. My photographs are true, they have gone no transformations nor carry any traces of other photographs, they have benn only modified according to my feelings. This is a picture of my world, which I paint by extracting colors and hidden content from the image. Such creativity falls not only in the field of photography but also in various fields of contemporary art.

Elżbieta Waszczuk