Zofia Adamiak

Enter the Wind and Feel at Home I
acrylic, canvas, 2020

Enter the Wind and Feel at Home II
acrylic, canvas, 2020

In my work, I concentrate mainly on designing a metaphorical space with dark shapes. I am concerned with demonstrating a changeability of the descriptive into the theoretical form: thus, I change open windows and doors into non-ideal squares and curved lines. They suggest exits/entrances; they invite into an unknown journey of passage, into exploring the world -behind-, -under- and, most importantly -within.

I applied a similar approach to the subject of THE FLIGHT OF ICARUS exhibition. In pieces presented here, I display my interpretation of an old picture Zenek took at his home in Kosobudki. He superimposed two films, thus connecting the past to the present, with wind in net curtains suggesting a blow of hope for the future.

My paintings also emerge as a new reality, creating a fresh space for reflection. They lead to subsequent inspirations and worlds. I try to represent a type of solitude that interests me: that in which the human turns towards themselves. I think that this is the precise path into discovering unknown realities, while the real world of taxes, politics, working from 10 to 6, and growing prices of vegetables ceases to have as large and overbearing significance. Such, in my view, was Zenek. I met him when I was a child and was slightly scared of him. Long-silver-haired: always energetically directed inside, spending whole days in the woods to return charged and talk about art and the current world next to an enormous table in the dinning room. Those were one of my first memories related to any sort of artistic world.

Now, I think we were connected by the need for finding a passage between realities, the formation of new worlds, underworlds and overworlds; the in-the-mean-worlds in the meantime. Perhaps, the unrecognisability and anonymity, the connection to the rhythm of nature, was another space (a fascinating place of particular uncertainty between the recognisable and un-recognisable)? The active factor in creating? I do not know, I would love to ask him today, and I would surely receive a reply as deep as the bottom of the lake in Kosobudz. Drinking strong coffee on the stairs of the forest house (no leaning against the pole!).

We became closer with Zenek when, as an almost grown-up woman, I chose to study art (how could it be otherwise, having been raised in the land so saturated with curiosity about it). Directed by memories and love for Magda and Zenek, I ended up in Zielona Góra, where, surprisingly, both became whole-heartedly engaged in our (mine and my brother's) artistic back-up – but also – created for us, in a place so distant from our family home, its replica. From an absent cat, Zenek became a companion and guide through the world of inspiration and creativity; lines and blots.

He had a wonderful approach to students, a great patience, and I, as an old acquaintance (and a child for potential adoption, as we sometimes joked), received from him, besides private correctives, a humorous blink of his eye and a supportive smile. Having become a conscious painter, I see how great was Zenek's influence on the shaping of my artistic awareness: how nothing is stable, and reality changes with every blink, feeling, flash of light, or – better glasses. Curiously, how even now, having created a void behind him, through this memorial exhibition, he transforms it into something potential (becoming or unbecoming), into a pretext for emergence and teaching of art, but also of an individual shape of memory of him in everyone of us.

In the film, someone pressed pause and, for a while, a future time has been withheld.