Brussels, 14th October 2015

"Paintings are not facts. They are invitations to dance"
Chris Martin


So how to speak about a painting without fixing it’s meaning, limiting its potential?
How to describe what a painter does without stopping the movement that is so natural to a painting? What’s the nature of the movement in a painting? It’s not as moving as a moving image is, and it’s not as still as a film still is. The depth of a painting ensures the movement between different layers of paint, layers of time. A painting’s invitation to dance is an invitation to not freeze the painting’s surface in an image still but to let the mind engage in the movement between different fragments of presence. Different than a photo, the pictorial plane of a painting happens in time and registers different moments. It’s all there but it’s up to the onlooker to take time and mental space to let the painting unfold itself or to take it as an image.
When a painting invites one to dance, it invites one’s mind to move along these revealing and withdrawing layers, allowing for mutual change.

Olga Raciborska’s paintings are containers of sub-consciousness: the desire to inhabit fictional worlds where transformative powers have no limits and where non-sense makes sense. A human leg appears out of a dense pattern, a chain saw out of a cloud like stain, a human face is kissing a giant shrimp, and a dragon tail ends an iceberg machine. Each painting is a whole new story of figurative and narrative disintegration.

The process can be divided into two parts. There is the part of collecting material that could be anything carrying abstract potential and a sense of drama. It’s a purely subjective criterion of the artist, of what she can claim as appropriate for transformation. Whenever one spots a figurative element in her painting, it has been most surely brought to an absurd state, devoid of any recognizable functionality. The drama comes from the juxtaposition of incongruent elements, colors or textures.
The second part of the process is the intuitive and emotional process of actual painting. It’s intimate.

Olga Raciborska’s paintings are battlefields of harmony and strangeness, a beauty and a beast. They are of strong visceral qualities: work of the stomach, intestinal roads and liver emotions. They seem to ask: what if alimentary and reproductive systems coincided? How would sex taste and food feel on the moon?

Let’s dance.
Agata Jastrząbek






Download CV

Brussels, 14th October 2015

"Paintings are not facts. They are invitations to dance"
Chris Martin


So how to speak about a painting without fixing it’s meaning, limiting its potential?
How to describe what a painter does without stopping the movement that is so natural to a painting? What’s the nature of the movement in a painting? It’s not as moving as a moving image is, and it’s not as still as a film still is. The depth of a painting ensures the movement between different layers of paint, layers of time. A painting’s invitation to dance is an invitation to not freeze the painting’s surface in an image still but to let the mind engage in the movement between different fragments of presence. Different than a photo, the pictorial plane of a painting happens in time and registers different moments. It’s all there but it’s up to the onlooker to take time and mental space to let the painting unfold itself or to take it as an image.
When a painting invites one to dance, it invites one’s mind to move along these revealing and withdrawing layers, allowing for mutual change.

Olga Raciborska’s paintings are containers of sub-consciousness: the desire to inhabit fictional worlds where transformative powers have no limits and where non-sense makes sense. A human leg appears out of a dense pattern, a chain saw out of a cloud like stain, a human face is kissing a giant shrimp, and a dragon tail ends an iceberg machine. Each painting is a whole new story of figurative and narrative disintegration.

The process can be divided into two parts. There is the part of collecting material that could be anything carrying abstract potential and a sense of drama. It’s a purely subjective criterion of the artist, of what she can claim as appropriate for transformation. Whenever one spots a figurative element in her painting, it has been most surely brought to an absurd state, devoid of any recognizable functionality. The drama comes from the juxtaposition of incongruent elements, colors or textures.
The second part of the process is the intuitive and emotional process of actual painting. It’s intimate.

Olga Raciborska’s paintings are battlefields of harmony and strangeness, a beauty and a beast. They are of strong visceral qualities: work of the stomach, intestinal roads and liver emotions. They seem to ask: what if alimentary and reproductive systems coincided? How would sex taste and food feel on the moon?

Let’s dance.
Agata Jastrząbek






Download CV