Attractive Man Seeks Woman

I do not know who places lonely-hearts advertisements, nor who reads them. They belong to some archaic world. They have existed for years, but always at the margins. They are anachronistic and filled with a naive belief in their own agency. Jadwiga Sawicka has used them as commonplace stereotypes for expressing life’s desires and the search for happiness. A wall of such notices is intended to show how unreal and illusory the pursuit of an ideal can be, and how trite and false even the most dramatic loneliness can sound. The banality of the situation is underscored by the sickly-sweet smell of cheap perfume. The reverse of this idyllic installation is the artist’s next work: a black, enclosed room containing the short, forceful phrase I HATE YOU, illuminated and moving across the wall. It is a master key of a phrase, hard and sharp in its direct reading, used at extreme moments to wound, when small, concealed irritations accumulate and bring everyday conflicts to a definitive conclusion. There is the simple story: the appearance of love ends in the truth of hatred. The exhibition is completed by digitally manipulated photographs of dresses. Unnaturally narrowed, they would not fit even the thinnest anorexic body, but they are intended solely as icons of desire and the pursuit of an ideal of beauty.

The artist neither judges nor appraises, mocks nor ridicules; she merely presents a situation, as ever, in the manner most straightforward for her. She does the same in other works. They generally consist of terse messages drawn from newspaper language or from advertising copy and leaflets. They sound like press headlines, yet are highly personal. Hand-painted letters, awkwardly squeezed into the rectangle of the canvas with no regard for spelling, always against a flesh-pink ground, give the statements an individual character. Realistic representations of articles of clothing appear alongside the texts. They have clearly been used and worn by someone, but now they are empty and impersonal, traces alone. The eloquent absence of the body from these icons is replaced by the “corporeality” of the text paintings. The two complement one another and complete each other’s meanings.

The artist often amplifies words, giving them a monumental character. She is entirely at home on billboards. Her work Conversion, Taming, Training was one of the finest projects in the AMS Outdoor Gallery. Numbers operates on a comparable scale of meaning: a series of fifty-five small prints in which she assembled laconic fragments of newspaper cuttings listing the numbers killed and injured in disasters and natural catastrophes, or harmed by civilisation. She arranged them in numerical order, from “1 person killed, 2 injured” to “a billion without work”. This cold, calculating system gives the small fifteen-by-fifteen-centimetre inscriptions their force.

She also places texts on walls like wallpaper, on columns like inscriptions, and across the spaces of windows. At times they are so powerful that, unintentionally, they begin to dominate the whole and become the unofficial titles of group exhibitions. This occurred in an exhibition at Foksal Gallery, a protest by several artists against the bureaucratic administration of art. Sawicka covered the gallery windows with strips bearing a repeated stamp: BUREAUCRACY. The reversed letters B and R disturbed the ordinary rhythm in an unsettling way, irritating the eye and attracting attention. In the exhibition Art Supermarket, Sawicka likewise covered the windows of Dom Artysty Plastyka with wallpaper bearing a single word: PLAGUE. It conveyed the meaning of a show constructed in opposition to the commonplace xenophobia found in the treatment and reception of contemporary art. In Sawicka’s ironic understanding, the plague consists of all those artists whose work has led public opinion to pillory them.

Sawicka directs the encounter with the public with precision, selecting and weighing tensions and controlling the message. I HATE YOU. The inscription irritates, introduces unease, attacks, forces the viewer into a defensive posture and compels a response. From passive observers, we become participants in an imaginary conflict. Never before had the artist addressed the viewer so directly, aggressively and in the first person. Her messages had always been depersonalised or introverted: KILLS AGAIN, SHE TOOK EVERYTH(ING), BE/HIND FREE, REGR/ETTED DE/STROYED, CAU/SES CANCER. Here, for the first time, the viewer takes the message personally.

I HATE YOU. It is intended to stimulate and release adrenaline, to attract and intrigue through light and movement while repelling through meaning, so that everyone feels uncomfortable and guilty. Whom is this art meant to reach? We might invoke a passage from Proust’s Swann in Love, a work the artist appears to appreciate: “When an intelligent man is afraid of looking ridiculous, it is not in the eyes of another intelligent man; just as a man of fashion does not fear that his elegance will be unappreciated by a great nobleman, but rather by a boor.” In other words, Jadwiga Sawicka addresses those who wish to listen to her, who seek to understand and enter into dialogue. She rejects all who are unconvinced, indifferent or hostile.

Art does no harm; it cannot do harm. If it did, it would not be art. Sawicka knows this well and, although she says, “I indulge unhealthy, negative instincts — scandals, sensations, blood and crime attract me,” she has no desire to flaunt them. Provocation and scandal are alien to her. Even when she uses blunt, abrasive formulations, she does so solely to reveal a cruel reality. One might imagine that such emphatic art must be backed by an equally powerful, assertive personality who carries all the wrongs of the world on her shoulders and seeks to redeem it. Jadwiga Sawicka does not wish to change the world; she knows perfectly well that this would be utopian. She admits that she finds it more comfortable to be a pessimist, because only those without illusions cannot lose them. She submits to Murphy’s law: if something can go wrong, it certainly will. Yet a certain hope shines through this enormous dose of pessimism. “If I expressed the opinion that ‘life is dreadful’,” the artist says, “I would have no objection to someone proving that it is not.” A moment later, she adds cheerfully: “I could offer a few examples of life being wonderful myself, but I would rather hear them from someone else, because that always sounds more authoritative.” Perhaps the words Bohumil Hrabal wrote in his Letter to the Participants in a Private View at the end of The Gentle Barbarian will sound soothing and add a pinch of optimism: “You who read this text, do not think only and exclusively about artistic techniques; think at the same time about the many colours and the wonder of existence, ticking from second to second, without end.”

The artist’s statements are quoted after the exhibition catalogue Jadwiga Sawicka: Nothing Inside, Bunkier Sztuki, Kraków, 2003.