Digestion contains many anthropomorphic codes. We refer to ‘stones in the belly’ or say that ‘a stone got caught in my throat’ when we are thinking of something unbearable or frightening. In the painting, stones are found in the oesophagus and the intestines. Digestion is impossible, deposits in the intestines have accumulated over many years. The liver is like lava, the lungs are a pond, and the heart is filled with the memory of lovers. The organism may be dysfunctional, but something constantly enters the heroine’s mouth and breaks through the stones in the oesophagus. It’s an afterimage of the city with a glow of lights above it.
The leitmotif of Paulina Stasik’s paintings is invariably bodies—levitating, captured in timeless lethargy—but also the coating of the body itself: the skin, which here functions as a kind of living shroud. The unique, dreamlike atmosphere of these canvases arises from mythological and fairy-tale inspirations.
Stasik evokes mythical Titans and Atlases in female form, but also images tied to children’s fantasies or even puppet theatre. The allusion to the sphere of myth, proto-spirituality and pansexuality is also the artist’s response to the contemporary fate of the world, saturated with apocalyptic prophecies, visions of climate disaster and wartime chaos.
The displayed situation may bare resemblance to a moment of suspension, a pause in a dance, an artful balance over the edge due to the joint bodies, a liminal point right before culmination, i.e. the collapse of the composition.
A depiction of a woman, from whose belly radiates with pink and orange light while her womb emits smoke.
The atmosphere in the painting is idyllic, and the clothes – body, are simply a carefree, flying cloud in the mist.
The painting belongs to a cycle of a continuous motif of miniature creatures, which are personifications of various emotional states and intentions.
The body, in this case, is a hybrid of fabric and humans flesh, endowed with new qualities.
The painting depicts a girl, who, in a triumphant pose, holds a mask – her own skin, i.e. a sheath, which uncovers, quite literally, her true colours.
The body functions here as a metaphor attesting to the human complexity and its diverse emotional states, which subsequently emerge on the surface of its flesh.
The painting is a continuation of the artist’s exploration of the female body.
The painting depicts fragments of a female body, neatly laid on a pedestal, what endows it with a sculptural resemblance.
The canvas is a part of a continuous series of divagations regarding the body and its fragmentation.
The body here is a subject of fragmentation, while the created situations – of derealisation.
The multiplication of eyes, lips and ears constitutes a beginning of the artist’s deformation experiments.
