Dorota Podlaska

Melodramas and private practices.
painting

About Dorota Podlaska's art.

Dorota Podlaska paints for fun. This fact is worth mentioning, right at the very beginning because it may prove to be helpful in further reception of her works. Dorota's works are not difficult to understand, yet they contain some qualities which might slightly disorientate a viewer.

The thing is that Dorota in her paintings refrains from many attributes, which consciously or nor, we expect to find in art. Here I have in mind characteristics such as big, closed forms, novelty, grand scale, incisiveness, pretences to universal values and perfection, and to make the long story short everything, which makes “serious" art acquire certain “weight." Dorota is not embodying any of popular artistic roles. She does not take a role of a demure artiste – creator nor of an artist – designer, who conceives his/her works according to the newest trends on the market of aesthetic ideas. She takes a risk of letting some air out of a swollen balloon of art and putting herself in an outsider position.

The specificity of Dorota's art is best described by a word “private." She makes artworks in a small (human you'd want to say) scale. She uses simple and cheap technologies and “low" forms. Her pictures are usually quite small – a lot of them is of a postcard size. She paints on cardboard. Stylistically her paintings recall comic stripes, naive art and caricature. So in this context “private" could be understood as casual and nonchalant form which allows maximum directness.

In the center of Dorota's attitude towards art lies a conception of art as an everyday practice. What's more, it is a practice of this “private" part of a day, when you're relaxed and can do whatever you want. Her technique corresponds to her strategy of art practice. Dorota's art., which can be produced in almost any environment, does not need big financial allowances, patronage nor institutions. Her works revoke Ik-Jong Kang's painting cycles. Kang, a Korean artist, after emigrating to New York used to work whole days in a grocery store. The only time, he devote to painting was while he was travelling on a subway from home to work. That's why he started to use miniature formats, which could fit into a pocket. On those he recorded his observations, impressions and moods. Dorota Podlaska's pictures also can fit into a pocket, or at least into a purse. It's not entirely without any meaning for social functioning of her works. Institutional circulation can very well be in this case exchanged by an independent or social one – for example all the works can be packed into a bag-pack and taken over to some friends' to be shown.

The strategy of "privacy" is a formula, which best corresponds to the subject matter of Dorota's art. Her works tell a story about dreams -- this part of life, which by definition does not fit easily in loud, public discourses. Women are the heroines, or rather the dreamers in her works. Dorota puts women in ordinary, everyday situations and roles of housewives, mothers and girlfriends. Women in her paintings dream of love, tenderness, sometimes of a whole bunch of muscular guys who are running around them or maybe of cutting off a insensitive husband's head. Dorota's art talks about dreams, however it is not dreamy. Her stories are ironic, sad and quite often cruel. Almost always there's a tension between idealization of a dream and very un-ideal reality of women's lives.

I mentioned that Dorota's painting has a lot in common with comic stripes, apart from the form they also share a similar kind of narrativity. Dorota often puts her works into narrative cycles or picture stories. Some of those stories deploy a form of painterly installation – works of a postcard size are displayed, for example, in library drawers. After taking a drawer out, the viewer can follow the story by looking at consecutive shots, which are organized like files in a catalogue.

Dorota Podlaska, while telling about love and women's dreams, often uses pop-cultural conventions of a romance and especially that of a soap opera and Hollywood love story. She pastiches their melodramatic tone, cheesy aesthetics and pathetic sentimentality. One of her panting cycles is made up of an enormous number of “happy ends". These 'happy ends" are represented in a classical way with kissing couples, sunsets, hearts and flowers. All these ironic interpretations of this world of “harlequin" emotions come from Dorota's interests in love images functioning in mass imagination. Dorota fully accepts the fact that, pop culture schemas are not only embedded in all of us but also they shape our dreams. She's conscious that for a lot of women cheap soap opera thrills are the only form of love, that these women deal with on daily basis...

All this suggests a feminist interpretation of Dorota's art. Form of her works, unpretentious and casualness can be analyzed through a prism of a dialectic of feminine and masculine art. According to rooted in our culture scheme, men's creativity is monumental, important and serious; it deals with big issues. On the other hand women's art somewhat smaller, instead of philosophical divagations it's soaked in emotions and sentiments, it can fit in a hand-bag. Dorota manifestly places herself in this stereotype but at the same time she negates the universality of artistic hierarchies. Without any complexes she puts intimacy, emotions and sentimentalism – concepts traditionally thought of as feminine – as an alternative for so called manly values. What's more, the quasi-naive stylistics of her works is in fact very girlish. Conventions of soap operas or romances, products addressed to feminine public, are used here to construct a bitter-sweet, and sometimes only bitter depiction of a feminine world. It's a world of girls torn between various home tasks, loaded with groceries, dumped and unloved, and men – cold and selfish husbands, cynical machos, wicked heart-breakers and dreamed of, ideal lovers.

Dorota's decisively feminine (and not universal, that is masculine) perspective combined with elements of a satire and a malicious critique, allows to inscribe her art into a feminist discourse. But more important than a critical discourse is a joy of painting and casualness of her representations, painterly story-telling and blurring borders between art and everyday life. Because, as we know already, Dorota paints for fun.

Stach Szabłowski