Retrospective
SHOW I
"In
her painting..."
In
her painting Maja Sochaniewicz focuses on specific subjects. The
first well-defined series called "Victory" was composed
of powerful, sort of archaic female figures, remote sisters of Nolde's
characters, Gauguin's beauties or Matisse's models. The end of '70s
brought series with groups of figures, scenes from whorehouses,
"dancers and ballerinas", "punks". The situation
presented on canvas acquired more descriptive precision and a higher
dose of realism without losing momentum, solid fracture treatment,
and vivid colors, so typical for Maja Sochaniewicz's painting.
Even though it never became a fact, the artist feared falling
into realism and portraying life, which was against the real spirit
of her painting. She desired more freedom and fun in "smearing
paints", as she herself calls it. Therefore, she gave up painting
interiors with figures and changed subjects, but not the atmosphere
of her artwork, always full of universal symbolism. It implied experiments
in painting techniques: painting in metal foil and large sheets
of cardboard, combining ink acrylic paints and decorative varnish.
recently Maja Sochaniewicz has also applied shiny brocades and powdered
pigments, which create the effect of velvet surfaces.
The
painting presented in this exhibition is saturated with Pan-biological
elements, symbolic and sensual at the same time. As in ancient mythology,
half human, half divine creatures populate this world, and they
have strong links with structured still life or studies of real
life objects. They areimages completely deprived of unnecessary
external similarity.
"Angels",
a motif recently favored by the artist, are more like winged demons,
carnal and subject to emotions, closer to Assyrian myths to Christianity.
Her recent works strike with variety of matter end color combined
with synthetic form, with a desire to find a sign, a pictogram.
The easily perfectible uncompromising attitude of those austere
composition, created by restless wide movements of her brush are
softened by subtlety and the choice of color. Compared to her earlier
works, with their contrasts, sharp, even harsh at times, the art
of Maja Sochaniewicz tends to nuances, enriched by silver and gold
tones.
Looking
at her paintings, we have a feeling of facing universal order, primary
and primitive in its nature, pagan in a way, where the same spiritual
element exist in a plant, an animal and a human being, and the half
divine element is equally hard to extract from the human nature
as it is hard to draw a line between what is part of humans, plants
and animals. Therefore, the photographs Maja Sochaniewicz included
in this catalog cannot be viewed just as a poetic joke, but also
as camouflaged sort of artistic credo.
Kinga
Kawalerowicz
Retrospective
SHOW I, Gallery
of Critics, Warsaw, 1984
Retrospective
Show III
IN
THE BEGINNING WERE WOMEN...
"In the beginning were women.
They were powerful, imperious and mad.
They were vital, sensual, inspired. They were devilish female angels.
They were like the Mantis seducing males with physical beauty.
They dominated men and nature, negligent of their surroundings,
negligent of every one and everything except carnal love, the only
value that life offered them. The
women from Maria Sochaniewicz's paintings, Victoria, Azteca, Nefretete,
Primavera, heroines in many embodiments, have yielded to a force
they initially underestimated. They have been defeated by time which
has slowly, imperceptibly transformed their monumental figures into
frail shapes. Deprived of their main asset, their breathtaking bodies,
they have lost absolute primacy in the world. At their creators
instance, they have been forced to accept an inferior position,
among men, plants and animals. Degraded to a rank of barely discernible,
nonchalant traces of the brush, they have merged with the surrounding
matter and their partners, and have hidden behind screens painted
up with serpents.
What has remained in the foreground is nature, as rapacious, disturbing,
sensual and at the same time severe and unyielding as once the women.
For
four years now, Maria Sochaniewicz's canvases an drawings have been
filled with reptiles, fish and leaves. Despite their well-defined
forms, they are intriguingly sensual and mysterious. Though almost
free of stylization, they seem synthetic as well as decorative.
And
yet, their natural shapes are as straight forward as their painted
transposition.The disturbing, vibrating bodies of the fish and serpents,
and almost animal like plants correspond in a strange way to the
anthropomorphic silhouettes in Sochaniewicz's other works executed
at the same time...
Maria evidently avoids producing uniform images. She oscillates
between subtlety, expression and decorativeness, almost bordering
on kitsch. She surprise the viewer with the material used for the
groundwork of her paintings; at times, she is tired of two dimensions,
and arranges a chosen area in the house or at the gallery by means
of additional elements. She makes experiments with various materials,
combining paint with fabric, brocade with mirrors.
All these qualities, and especially her consistent attraction to
figuration, resulting from energetic strokes of the brush, and up
to an easily definable style, Maria's oeuvre fits in with the Neue
Wilde Malerei, so popular for the last few years. But, Maria started
to paint like this many years ago. So, wouldn't it be more justified
to call her a harbinger of expressive figuration?
Fortunately,
Sochaniewicz claims no titles, makes light of nominal questions
and simply paints what she finds emotionally fascinating, evidently
concerned with the ambiguity of apparently unequivocal forms.
Monika
Malkowska
Retrospective
Show III, November, 1987
Retrospective
SHOW I
"Majka
Sochaniewicz. I like her painting..."
" Majka Sochaniewicz. I like her painting and this
is the reason why I am writing this introduction to her catalog.
In fact I should have married her long ago, but now we are both
past such nonsense - she paints, I write introductions.
Delicate
Mary and her cycle of hard solid pictures. The variety of women she
paints. This lack of consistency is only superficial, in fact there
is a very feminine consistency underlying all her painting. An original,
overdrawn style bordering on the primitive and caricature. And what
seems obvious to me is her conscious departure from the primitive,
although at first reading we detect here a strong affinity to glass
painting.
