My Paintings – Traces That Remain
In my artistic practice, I am drawn to the image as a space of memory, absence, and silence. Not so much a depiction as a trace — subtle, incomplete, yet often more powerful than a literal narrative. I don’t paint from imagination. My work begins with photographs — mostly found online, sometimes archival images such as Zbyszko Siemaszko’s photographs of Warsaw from the 1960s. These are fragments of the city, places seemingly familiar yet viewed anew — through personal reflection and painterly gesture.
Photography is not an endpoint in my work, nor is it something to be copied. I treat it as a starting point — something real, yet distant, that needs to be reinterpreted and filtered through emotion, memory, and uncertainty. I do not hide the source; quite the opposite — I acknowledge it to make the narrative more credible. Painting becomes a continuation of photography, and at the same time, an attempt to capture something that escapes documentation — an inner tension, an atmosphere of silence.
I use gestures of rubbing, erasing, blurring — not as stylistic effects but as acts of memory. The image passes through time and forgetting. It bears the marks of absence. I don’t aim for direct representation — I prefer to suggest, to leave open signs, to invite the viewer into a story that remains unfinished.
I feel a strong kinship with artists like Gerhard Richter, Luc Tuymans, and Wilhelm Sasnal — those who engage with painting not just as an aesthetic medium, but as a form of testimony. Their works do not decorate; they provoke. That approach is very close to my own.
At the center of my work lies identity — not as a stable category, but as a process, a fracture, a tension between what is remembered and what is silenced. In my paintings, Warsaw is not merely a setting — it becomes a body of a city that remembers. Faded facades, blank plaques, illegible traces — all of these become material for reflection. I do not reconstruct the past — I create its contemporary echo.
My paintings are quiet. They don’t shout or dominate. They observe and listen. They invite the viewer to pause, to reflect, to feel unease. Their strength lies in restraint — in what remains unsaid.
For me, painting is a way of engaging with the unrepresentable. With what was and has been erased. With what has been silenced but still exists. I look for what lies beneath the surface — what remains after the form has vanished.
What I do is an attempt to preserve — not facts, but feelings and traces. I do not speak for others. I try to give space to those whose voices were muted.
Prof. Wioletta Jaskólska