ABOUT EXHIBITION

Andrzej Bednarczyk
Dorota Pietrzyk's work

Enchantment.
It's a strange word that resounds somewhere in its interior (insofar as words have interiors) of capturing, grasping, some kind of grasping, taking or being taken possession of. To be enthralled is, in a way, to be enchanted to the point that all my attention is unerringly focused on the object of attention. It is quite easy to recognize a person standing in front of a work of art or a beautiful landscape in a state of awe, because such a person does not belong to a common space with us, he is extraterritorial, surrounded by an "event horizon" beyond which not a speck of his world can penetrate. Enchantment, is also a state of some sinking into the depths of thoughts, following the object of one's fascination. Somewhere in all this there is a resemblance to a state of enchantment, in which the entire universe, incomprehensible in its size and diversity, condenses into this one fragment of itself. The objects of admiration can be things of great magnitude: a seashell, a pebble, a leaf, snow crystals, a child's scribble, a phrase of a few sounds or even silence, a phrase of a few words and their elusive melody, the emptiness of a field or water.
Awe places the observer in subjection to the object of adoration, does not allow us to control it, forces us to listen rather than talk, to ask questions rather than instruct, and thus makes us students rather than teachers. There is in the state of rapture a kind of "primal amazement" and associated fear. Could it be that this is the essence of King Solomon's words: "The beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord," as a figure of all human endeavor to understand the essence of things?
Delight, those snares set for people who never cease to be children, lies at the heart of Dorota Pietrzyk's creative attitude. Undeniably, it constitutes the "primum mobile" of her artistic search. In her works we will certainly find neither criticism of human behavior nor complaints about the arduousness of human fate. Let's take a few steps to follow the artist on the path of everyday studio work.

Dorothy wove a pineal gland.
Something between a cobweb and a mental net of shell construction. This work is so delicate that I'm afraid to get close to it, lest I destroy its structure. Thin threads, pieces of muslin, tasteful colors, but most of all the air and the light carried by it, build this poetic tale of harmony of shapes, sizes and textures. It delights with its useless beauty and delicate modesty, like the thought of a mad architect-jeweler who can't decide whether to turn this thought into a Gothic cathedral or an openwork brooch. I ask Dorota where she got her inspiration from, and she tells me: "this is a cross-section of the hippocampus seen under a microscope. That 'inflorescence' over there is the pineal gland. And here look, this is the pancreas. Beautiful, isn't it?"
The enchantment broke. For a split second, to make room for a new amazement at the perfection of things and at the unexpected places where beauty seeps in. The inside of the human body, its viscera and lymphatic fluids, portrayed by scholastic moralists as an abomination of animalism, for Dorothy is an inexhaustible source of awe. Where did the hippocampus come from in the artwork? Dorota has worked for years with publishers of scientific medical literature, illustrating many professional articles and dissertations. Human anatomy has no secrets from her. She knows the universe of the body in its entirety and in different orders of magnitude, with pencil, brushes and paint she touched every cell , tissue, organ. From these trips she brings back trophies - beautiful structures seen in the eyepiece of a microscope. So what's surprising about the fact that Dorota worships Leonardo da Vinci's sketchbooks? She knows them and admires them, but goes her own way. She doesn't pretend to be a Renaissance man, she lives here and now in the 21st century. Both, on the other hand, equally infected by admiration, show us their discoveries of the preciosities of the cosmos, each for his time, for his measure.
Leonardo da Vinci does not exude the depth of his personality, he hides in the shadows, behind the works of his brilliant thought, he draws our attention beyond himself. Through his art he learned about the world, discovered beauty, in which truth is contained. Dorota Pietrzyk in this attitude is a faithful disciple of Leonardo. She does not claim comparisons, and in our conversations she has repeatedly paid homage to her master in a modest way.

Dorothy picks up a pebble from the beach.
She turns it in her fingers, brings it closer to her eyes, moves it away, looks at it under the light. I have a feeling that she is hardly about to press it to her ear and start listening or tasting its mineral flavor with her tongue. This pebble was spotted among tens of thousands of others. Why exactly this one and not some neighboring one? After all, it is neither noble nor more beautiful than the others. The moment she embraced it with her eyes and picked it up, Dorothy brought it out of the embrace of nature. Now admiration is born gradually, as the shapes and colors are revealed, the beauty and harmony of the course of millions of years and events that shaped it are revealed. This is amber. Dorota looks at it through a magnifying glass, draws, paints, weaves, studies, "listens" to it, returns again, and draws, changes techniques , compositions, arrangements. I saw her in the middle of this work. She was not trying to find a perfect way to express herself, but a pure way for the beauty and truth of this flimsy crumb of matter to resound. This work has something of the meditation of heightened attention, and like any meditation, it serves no purpose, leads to nothing, is autotelically itself.

Dorota listens to the sound of the lute.
From this listening are born works as immaterial as the music itself.Inspired by the patterns of rosettes placed on the resonance boxes of these noble instruments, they free themselves from their prototypes, creating harmony diagrams neither of galactic gravitational balances, nor of weightless floating and shining their own light on the inhabitants of the murky ocean depths, nor of proportional networks of Gothic cathedrals.The unequivocal assignment of meaning to these shapes is impossible, but also unnecessary.Again, in the likeness of pure music, stimulating our imagination, but free from latching on to an unambiguous meaning, these shapes can be anything that the strings of our imagination rub against.That's how it is, true art robs no one of dreams and dreams but enriches them with new horizons.

Dorota bites into a strawberry.
The nibbled fruit in front of the artist's attentive eyes reveals its interior and together with halved pomegranates, melons, watermelons, tangerines becomes the motif of subsequent paintings.They are juicy, full of sweetness, but for her they are not just a source of culinary delights.They conceal the kernel and mystery of life.They become an allegory of the truth hidden from the eyes of the profane.What is hidden in the darkness, what is inaccessible in the interior, what is elusive in its ethereality, attracts the eye and mind of the eternally amazed child hidden in the mature creator-searcher.

It is fascinating that Dorota Pietrzyk's works, created out of admiration and in admiration, delight with their freedom from empty decorativeness.
They do not make the world more pleasant.
They do not beautify it. He is, after all, sufficiently and matchlessly beautiful.
They do not decorate the walls of the palace. As C. S. Lewis wrote; After all, no one looks at the walls when there is a King in the room.
Rather, they sing the aching elegance of the cosmos.