Who does not remember games from their childhood? Looking at clouds in the sky to call observed familiar shapes? Looking at sometimes surprising shapes of casting shadows given by well-known objects. Close watching of the surfaces of stones that resemble models of planets or asteroids.
Time passed more slowly and the world hid magic and secret. We already know that over the hill and far away is just another hill… and one more… Clouds are simply made of condensed steam, shadow is the resultant of shape and light direction and stones forms are just the result of geological and erosion processes.
Katarzyna Jachimowicz proposes us coming back to discovering mysteries of surrounding world. Using combination of four mirror images of one photograph, she makes abstract pictures. Their symmetry is of such strength that the photographs from which they were born remain in hiding, although before our eyes. It is very difficult, looking at the whole image, separating in our minds the quarter from which the whole image was created. A simple combination brings a variety of forms. We can see emerging faces, masks, dragons or insects heads. We might not know anything about the history of art, the rules of composition or any relations to works of other artists. Intuition and receptiveness to the play of associations are enough. We can take the shown images as analogy to another game from our childhood – a toy kaleidoscope tube in which a handful of unattractive glass changes into fascinating colourful pattern.
After a while we find something else. It is an incentive to the quest of mutual relationships between elements of reality, focusing on those elements that some might recognize as usual and common. I have thought that this is just that state of mind to which a journey brings us, we look with greater concentration searching for similarities and differences to the world we know. Then, it might not be by accident that great majority of material to her works, the author finds during her journey.
Maciej Kałwiński
translated by: Sylwia Staniecka