Paintings

Mia Dudek departs from s the medium of photography – so far integral to her research on the body and space – in favour of painting, attempting to define a new language of expression. The works that emerge are not so much a formal change as a significant ontological shift. The images do not represent, but act as organic events, bodily discharges that materialise from the tension between the visible and the invisible, the present and the absent, the spoken and the unspoken.

The inspiration for this series of works was a reflection on bodily inefficiency – not as a disability, but as a liminal state in which the subject is forced to reformulate their own understanding of the body, purpose and identity. In the spirit of Virginia Woolf’s essay, “a state of physical and mental confusion radically changes the perception of the world – it strikes at the elementary order of existence, creating a turning point in which the individual withdraws from the previously woven networks of relationships, desires and goals”. This state of “organic collapse” opens the eyes to what is barely noticeable. The accompanying turn towards the self, interpreted as potential desertion or alienation, is the first stage of an ongoing transformation.

Dudek’s painting is not about illustrating this transformation, but about experiencing it. The paintings are box compositions – structures in which repetition and multiplication act as a transducer of emotions and tensions. The compositions are meant to resemble palimpsests, in which successive layers of matter and meanings are arranged into forms – liquid, soft, physiological. Their organic, sometimes sensual form evokes blood, tears, secretions – not as an ornament, but as psycho-history. A deliberate, unproductive productivity against the current. Each painting is an echo of another, a transformation, accumulation, repetition that does not seek a final form, but remains in a state of constant formulation.

In this exhibition, echoes of his previous practice are to continue to resonate: the search for the relationship between body and architecture, between private intimacy and the impersonal structure of living. After years of working with brutalist architecture and materials of a cold, often oppressive nature, Dudek continues his gesture towards the interior – without giving up questions about the boundary: body as interior and surface, painting as a place where substance and intention change places. The current elements intelligently connect with earlier elements and signal together within the entirety of his previous practice.