Wela , Elisabeth Wierzbicka

[1][[2]] Unreal realities

Wandering through an installation by Wela one imagines oneself in a Gogol novel, as the unreal becomes real! It is not some kind of technique made to fool us, but an ingenious artistic device.

Saddened by seeing the public walk rapidly through an exhibition without really looking at the works, Wela decided to make a gesture which enabled the painting to emerge,thus presenting it from the interior. Her installations solve precisely a particular abstract problem- namely ,how to show the contents of the work as "an open sky" and how to open two dimensional space into real spatial awareness.

The spectator is invited to wander inside the painting and not to contemplate it from outside. Break the shop window and there you are!

But where in a shop window you will find shoes,belts ,handbags and other useful articles for your vanity, in an "installation painting" by Wela you will find all the lines,forms and colours that the artist uses to give that pure emotion which is food for the soul ,for life,intellect and waves of memory.

Unlike other painters, the appearance of an exterior reality does not interest her. A bench, a street, the outlines of a tree, the flight of a bird do not directly concern her, though the weight and density of their presence are a part of her daily artistic preoccupations.

The interior reality of human beings, the mechanism which pushes them to act and react between themselves ,are Wela's strange models.

As violent and gentle memories are wiped away, views of revolt have substance . This sense of vertigo shatters joy and either suffocates or liberates the strands of life that trail our being. The artist is interested in those things which are the nature of the invisible;she wishes to translate them into the actual material of the drawing.

She is convinced that each one of us has a language so different to each other that it is impossible to be able to hear each other completely. With a pencil in her hand she develops a strain of metaphysical monads which intensify the mystery of the drawing.

On this subject her latest black and white paintings are significant. A rock which is angular,even spiky betrays a steady hand and a soul in movement .

She starts by hastily sketching somewhere on the surface of the white sheet and she builds up her drawing like a sculptor builds up the plaster on the wire. pursues her line, thickens it and gives it weight and density and when necessary she rubs out with no regret. The erasing is part of the drawing in the same way that memory is a part of the present, elliptical by nature. The composition places itself on the canvas as the need for the immediate form is developed ,so that it feeds itself.

Violent lines followed by sensual lines result in a sculptural form and the finished drawing.

Occasionally, we recognise figurative elements, partially completed; a chair leg falling into chaos . a human figure, a hand. It is impossible not to think of the foot of "la belle Noiseuse" from Balzac's novel "Le Chef-d'oeuvre inconnu".What would this great novelist from the early XIXth century see in this work, this conception of a world which is so much older than him?

Ileana Cornea

Critic of art