Aleksandra Rey

Who has seen a meadow with his own eyes? Have everybody really seen it? If so, why do Alexandra Rey’s paintings stay in the memory for such a long time? After all, they are just images of meadows and trees… Sometimes, they show just a few branches in the brief period of early spring, when the buds a...

Who has seen a meadow with his own eyes? Have everybody really seen it? If so, why do Alexandra Rey’s paintings stay in the memory for such a long time? After all, they are just images of meadows and trees… Sometimes, they show just a few branches in the brief period of early spring, when the buds appear but there are no leaves yet. Preschoolers would have no problem in telling what Alexandra Rey’s paintings depict. As always, it is much more of a problem with adults, though. Standing before these paintings, adults start to wonder at what they are looking, in fact. It is obviously a meadow, most certainly a deftly executed realistic painting. But how can it be both at the same time? After all, Rey does not imitate any photographic document of a meadow with the use of oil paint. Anyone familiar with painting can have no doubt that seeking a particular flower in the particular location in the meadow would be in vain. Naturally, you can read the title, ask the author about her inspiration and set off in search of the three purple trees or the flowering forsythia in the Chorzów park. You could visit the places where she paints: Przybyszów, Nowy Sącz or even Granny Halusia’s orchard – all this, however, without any chance of success. The meadows, shrubs, and even the tufts of weed growing between concrete paving blocks exist only in her paintings. They are constructed of colour, that is, of a unique mixture of paint and imagination.The category of what is real, so important to us, turns out to be a cluster of planes closely adhering to one another yet still separate. A flower exists in a manner different from its painterly image and the concept of flower exists in a still another way. We can see it, feel it, we know about it, but the possibilities of language are exhausted before we manage to clearly express this difference. Perhaps this is why we are so willing to repeat Gertruda Steins apparently tautological sentence: ”Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose”. This separateness, this ability to reach outside the boundaries of language is the metaphysical power of painting in the western culture. Rey’s plant paintings are more tautological than realistic. What we do not know is whether these are tautologies of nature or of our idea of it. Possibly, this is one of the secrets explaining why it is such a pleasure to look at these paintings and why we do not get bored with them after a while. Seemingly, one’s own imagination is the only view one is never bored with.

Rey is a painter, not a gardener (though if her fascination with painting plants lasts longer, probably these two completely separate skills will inevitably merge). The power and beauty of these paintings stem directly from the freedom of imagination supported by technical skill. It is not unreasonable to assume, however, that the beauty of at least a few of them is rooted in the artist’s conviction about the harmony of life and world. Harmonia mundi is an old, almost forgotten phrase in a dead language, but it reflects the perception of reality which is not expressed every day – a highly subjective perception, combined with the acceptance of life in its most common shape. These are intimate sensations more delicate than plants. The tangled thicket, the suggestiveness of the motive, the power of the contrasts between the colours does not make it easier to observe this purely interpretative layer. Paradoxically, the idyllic bliss which we experience when we look at flowering plants does not contribute to the precise observation which the paintings deserve. The permanent spring which fills practically all the paintings at the exhibition, does not facilitate it either.

It will be easier to understand how the paintings are created if we use a metaphor drawn from music. Rey is characterized by the ease of orchestration. She has a sense which allows her to retain a common tone despite the wildest improvisations of particular instrumental sections. Just view her meadows as if they were concerts played by the best jazz bands in the golden epoch of Polish jazz, or at the flawless rhythm in which Marek Grechuta sang the phrase by Józef Czechowicz:
”…the figures multiplied into a great crowd standing
And all of this is you
Your mind cut in iron cannot contain it…”

Blades of grass swing along the movement of the branches. The cobalt of the vicia syncopates the blue of the sky. Wild carrot sounds as if it was white. All this happens all at once, in one loud rolling sound The ease and joy of producing a form unheard of, unwritten and non-canonical is characteristic of jazz. Deeper, at the very bottom there is something archaic, closer to pure harmony. It is a tone slightly reminiscent of blues and slightly of baroque basso continuo. Subsequent strokes of the brush develop based on subsequent chromatic signs logically resulting from the scale. Here the obligation of faithfulness towards what has been seen is finally lost. What remains is the sense of melody, the desire to obtain a coherent whole. Large paintings executed in the recent years, in various manners composed of many small frames, prove that Alexandra Rey has a great gift for directing meadows. Irrespective of the composition of the orchestra – whether of poppies and chamomiles, or ragwort and common chicory – under her gaze, the meadows sound consistent, deep and expressive. And they leave us with the sense of pure pleasure so infrequent in today’s art, a pleasure a shade more distinctive than usual. After Edward Krasiński directed the waves of the Baltic Sea during the Panoramic Sea Happening by Tadeusz Kantor in 1967, I guess nobody in Polish art has demonstrated such a need for symphonic harmonization of nature.