Lena Wicherkiewicz
EMMANUELLE ROSE, THE DAUGHTER OF MARIA,
THE GRANDDAUGHTER OF ANNA

Women orants, priestesses raising hands in prayer
Girls of opulent bodies
Goddesses, Madonnas, Healers and Heavenly Archers. Patrons of good birth
Awakened and weeping. Women Stigmatics
Idols-acrobats with the agile lines of harmonious bodies
Grandmothers, mothers and daughters sitting in hieratic poses for a family portrait
Female icons of Beata Ewa Białecka

The feminine figures from her paintings are distinct, accomplished, carnal and outlined with exceptional clarity and precision. Their “confidence” and “concreteness” concern both their tangible existence in the painting and the artistic concept emerging from the form. It is no mere coincidence that in her workshop the artist attaches a visible importance to classical drawing techniques. The line: flexible, sophisticated but still strong and distinctive is the basic medium by which a painting is built; it both defines and constructs it. The line descended from the Lorenzetti brothers and Piero della Francesca but also drawing on David and Ingres and the classical masters of paint-based drawing of the Renaissance and the 18th century. Beata Ewa Białecka often emphasizes the unique role, that the early Renaissance plays in her artistic idea: she especially appreciates the line: clearly enhancing the form and the meticulously drafted space of the painting. The same features describe her paintings: the clearly drawn volumes of the bodies and an emphasis on their material identity – reliable and synthetic at the same time they evoke sculptural statuary and tectonics. The essential emphasis on drawing, the intentional linearity of the painting and the corresponding sculptural bulkiness is associated with the parallel reduction of the chromatic aspect. If the artist decides to introduce colour, it is a thoughtfully chosen one depending on its “significance” and symbolic representation. Białecka often chooses red – this particularly “feminine” of colours. The artist calls her paintings “albums”, referring an old Roman white or whitened plate, on which the most important information used to be written. Other times she uses the correlated name - “albinos”, to highlight the domineering white and cold palette on the one hand and restraint coupled with the strive to achieve a clear form on the other. This reduction of the colour scheme accentuates the autonomy of her style and art concept. The colour as an emotional medium is intentionally restricted in favour of the clarity of monochromatic expression, which transmits the pure concept and directs the viewer’s attention to its essence. In Beata Ewa Białecka’s painting the formal quality suggest the conventionality of the icon; the artist accurately follows elaborately developed patterns to achieve an essential synthesis.The choice of popular representations of Mary as Hodegetria or in the scene of Falling Asleep also references the tradition of icon. From the formal viewpoint this “reduction of painting technique”, like black and white photography, is similarly conventional and suggestive. By means of colour reduction, the artist introduces an accurate synthesis and weightiness; a certain “masculine element” juxtaposing the feminine theme.

Beata Ewa Białecka’s paintings are often interpreted in the perspective of Christian iconography and its reception. The references contained in her paintings are legible but she does not simply aim to appropriate the traditional canons of representation to contemporaneity. The significance of her works touches a deeper symbolic aspect. The artist reads and deciphers feminine senses concealed below Christian iconography, reveals the long forgotten feminine aspects of the spirituality. In her contemporary pietas she paints, Madonnas surrounded by daughters, scenes of christening and simple everyday family portraits, she accentuates the value of the ties bonding women and uncovers the lack of them in religious, iconographic images established by tradition. Such an assumption could explain why, alongside the images of religious genealogy (and not only the Christian one), Beata Ewa Białecka paints mythological figures or portraits of woman recognized in the secular world, in culture and also in the popular genres. Thus the portraits of Ophelia and Amanda Palmer. She also suggests female „equivalents” to the masculine representations: The Good Shepherd, Saint Sebastian or, in „The Virgin and Child with St. Anne” a little girl-Christ. However, these are not merely feminist gestures. With her works Białecka is demanding the broken bonds: the feminine, primordial and pre-Christian part. The non-Christian gods and idols introduced into her paintings seem to be yet another gesture of re-introducing the feminine element into the post-biblical, almost completely masculine world of spirituality and religion.
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