Opening: February 18, 2017, 7 pm
Exhibition on view through 25 March 2017
The new series of paintings by Natalia Brandt called Blinding relates to memory, to the way we remember things and what images do to our memory. Presented paintings have little in common with the principle of an immediately active Benjamin’s monad. Photographic prints, atteched to the canvas, are covered by the artist with painted patterns, covering the photographic depictions of destruction, suffering, cruelty. The act of painting is an act of concealing, of placing a cover onto the icons of horror – the photographs of victims of wars, terror, genocide, automatically consumed in daily news. The eponymous „blinding” means here a removal of an „effect of reality” from the images, preventing from an ideological naturalization of their perception.
Several paintings from the Blinding series are accompanied by postcards – standard views from various places, functioning as images reproducting our image of these locations. Postcards from Congo, Rwanda, Phnom Penh, Beirut or London present these places as tourist attractions. But motionless landscapes, which become a part of our visual memory, have been recalled for the reason of a „memory of evil”, which their names bring to mind. This kind of memory is referred to in the photographic prints on the canvas, scenes of horror covered by painted patterns. Their abstract forms are augmented details, „pieces of land” taken from the images depicted on the postcards. Forms, rescaled to the point of illegibility, lose their initial shape and create their own structure layered over, and to a various extent concealing the cruelty visible on the photographic prints. In these images, we deal not only with the reproduction of images of suffering, but also with a production of gaze and distribution of memory. By covering these depictions, the author of Blinding prevents the gaze from falling into the trap of an image, from letting it be guided by its rhetoric and memory. Speaking of „the conscience of images”, she tries to prevent their perception from being turned into a spectacle.
Natalia Brandt (1983) studied painting and drawing at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ponań, diploma in drawing and painting in 2009, since 2011 teaches at V Drawing Studio at the University of Arts in Poznań. She is author of paintings, drawings, objects, photographs, installations, videos, and artist’s books. Her solo exhibitions have been shown at venues such as Annex 14 Gallery, Zurich (2014); AT Gallery, Poznań (2014); Centro di Arte Contemporanea Café Europe, Rome (2013); Profile Foundation, Warsaw (2012, 2009); OKO/UCHO Gallery, Poznań (2007); Anex Gallery, Poznań (2006).
