‘There is such a power – to see and another power – to stop … ‘ is an exhibition in which the portrait mixes with the landscape, emotions flow from the works with color, lines and dynamic brush strokes reflect the intensity. In her works, Ewa Rogala touches upon the mental sphere with remarkable accuracy and care for the preservation of mental states. She focuses her efforts on decoding the emotions of the portrayed characters, expressing them in the most faithful way possible. As she admits: ‘we are an individual, a very delicate structure. A look inside myself, a moment of stoppage fascinate me as a painter.’

The artist chose an experiment with form as a cognitive medium: she plays with color, line, frame, and treats paper and canvas as a surface for mutual communication. She talks not only with the portrayed person, but with her own interior, constantly confronting herself with emotions. She tries to make what accumulated inside find its resonance in painting. The  fauvistic color gamut is conducive to feeling, it duplicates the sensation.

The artist’s portraits are not so much faithful imitation of a human, but mystical mirrors in which each of us can find a part of ourselves. This ab initio identity is the basis, it appears as a vis maior that drives us to create new works. An interesting procedure is also the point motive of omission and incompletion, which gives us the awareness of the collapse of memory, the distortions brought by memories over time, but also the moment of transition from an individual to a general, because what concerns one person may be a feature identified by the entire collectivity. The artist tames the challenges thrown by the mind and emotions with the help of an intense palette of colors and expressive lines, sometimes even using only the contour of the figure. She is not afraid to reach for various forms and methods of creation, which is also reflected in painted landscapes. Preserving elusiveness, mimetic nature, and continuous creation allow Ewa Rogala’s works to resonate with the recipient for a long time. The dissolving horizon emphasizes how ephemeral memories are, emphasizes that every attempt to come into contact with them imposes ex cathedra their subjectivization and individual processing. The dynamics of the lines breaks the viewer out of melancholy, but at the same time gives a clear proof of the blurring of memories. Emotionality appears to us here as a sine qua non condition. It is the same with a personal experience which will always be subjective. And this is all about individuality – it’s about showing the uniqueness with which we can come face to face.

Karolina Wójcik, art curator