She is standing opposite the viewer as an untamed priestess of an unknown religion, expecting due honours and manifesting her might arising from her womanhood. Precisely this is expressed in the following work “Thank God I’m a woman”. The advertising slogan is raised here to a manifesto even though the feminine in Białecka’s creation is not hurriedly translated into womanhood, the womanhood of a woman, feminine sexuality and other essentialising fetishes.

In the world of Beata Ewa Białecka paintings the women are self-conscious, either in the role of mothers or in their pre-mature years just expecting to take on their eternal function. Most of them wear sleek hair or turbans; they appear naked, in their underwear or in simple dresses. Each canvas arrives at a point of encounter between two dimensions: contemporaneity and the realm taken out of any chronology, timeless, evoked by associations with the old masters and ambiguities inscribed in the structures of particular works. The figures are frequently accompanied by streamers referencing medieval tradition, but here they are covered with company names, advertising slogans or the names of designer clothes setting the scenes in the early 21st century – here and now. The tiny naked figures assisting women and children in Białecka’s paintings also refer to the Middle Ages – that was the traditional way to demonstrate the presence of a soul leaving the body. These small figures, independent of gravitation, floating freely in the inner space of the paintings: “Two mothers” and “The Visitation”, seem to suggest another realm taking place in the background of the day-to-day, somewhere close and distant at the same time. Due to their presence the role of the women becomes almost archetypal and sanctified, not merely carnal and trapped in the physicality of her body.

The whole painting of Beata Ewa Białecka therefore offers an exceptionally interesting combination of the contemporary and the traditional, keeping a woman in its focus. Each frame excels in its precise construction, balanced relations within the painting and the ambiguity of the scenes owing to the skill of weaving the story into the language of the painting technique and reaching from its visual mediums, where each single element means and “symbolizes” thanks to its perfect placement within the picture, alongside other motifs: with or against them. Therefore senses are born from the way things are painted, each detail works in the visual and semantic sphere rendering cohesion and explicit example of how content can be captured by form. Białecka skilfully employs a specific and easily recognizable language of representation featuring perfectly led dialogue between contemporaneity and tradition, an apt and convincing spectrum of topics and an interesting painting technique. The hallmark of this technique can be found in the traces of pencil “shining” through the layers of paint, emphasizing the bulkiness of the figures and enhancing their optical weight in spite of the deliberate flatness of the paint layered on the canvas.

The ascetic colour scheme results in an enhancement of the form, highlighting and accentuating the feminine silhouettes, their bulkiness and dense carnality standing in sharp contrast from the surrounding. Due to the radical slimming down of the palette, the paintings achieve a freedom from any unnecessary or additional elements. Each canvas develops its own concept based on the essential aspects. It is the body of the hero that our attention is focused on since it does not compete with anything – its power over the viewer is absolute, crude in the greys, sharply outlined and immensely powerful. The pictorial anecdote is often skimmed to a laconic form intensified by humble and thus meaningful colouring. The visual structure is ultimately condensed and essentialised. The canvasses function like highly concentrated extracts. By referencing the world of advertisements and contemporary iconography they can be seen as instant products offering a unique saturation and density of the message. The restraint in the use of colours allows the message of particular works to stand out clearly stemming from the form which unquestionably calls the tune. There is nothing to distract the viewer’s attention, nothing to draw away from the semantic “core” of the canvases and the interpretation of the womanhood contained in them.

In the artistic output of Beata Ewa Białecka we find an interesting conversation between figuration, contemporaneity and traditional iconography, but also with the potentiality of the inner space of the painting and the possibilities of abstracting its most crucial areas in order to construct a strictly pictorial narration built with a relatively ascetic palette and figures contrasting in their sizes. The intriguing power of influence, polysemy, clearness and originality of the created vision – all these result from the tension kept between the particular factors of the composition. An encounter with Białecka’s canvases generates the anticipation to see more dwellers of this peculiar world, which will populate the works to come. And with the self-confidence of their predecessors they will activate the subversive and disquieting senses released at the borderline of contemporary iconography, deconstruction of stereotypical gender roles and the religious iconography of sacred tradition. The paintings of Beata Ewa Białecka, which I would call feminine and ecstatic, makes us aware that what really eludes seizure is the feminine.
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