Giuseppe Curonici
A new element has appeared in the composite-material creations
of Tamara Bialecka : an awareness of Time. Composite-material
Art is usually based on a relationship of simultaneity. A collage
of wood, glass, metal and other materials, where substances
and material forms that are presented together, simultaneously,
intertwine. Philosophy teaches us that time is one of the fundamental
aspects of all human experience. Now, the concept of time in
composite-material works acquires an enriched significance,
and modifies vision.
The themes treated by Tamara Bialecka are linked to the existential
and social condition of our time. We encounter some universal
values: the interior life of thought and urges, love, fraternity,
a desire for peace. However, they are seen in the light of
the present-day historical condition, the technological age,
internationalisation, the sense of risk and danger, the complications
of relations between human beings, with others, with the Other.
One of her pieces consists of a large, pink and delicate cushion,
tender like a live petal. Its pitiless tenderness is deceptive:
it is in fact superimposed by a sphere bristling with deadly
points ( the spines do not belong to, but are pointed against,
the rose ) whose form is inspired by a torture instrument,
the terrible iron-reinforced points of a whip the artists has
seen in a museum. These assemblages of materials and objects
play a symbolic role, because they tell us about events which
are not directly present, visible, but which we know to be
real. The fundamental pair of love and Death has become a meaty
cushion-petal and a whip, tenderness and danger. The reflection
is, at the same time, rational, intuitive and emotional : for
instance, why precisely this pink colour, and not another ?
The time of the past, underscored by passionate evocations
of monuments from antiquity, gives the work of T. Bialecka
a human and historical depth. The time in question is that
of subjective, interior personal life, and also shared subjective
time, the time experienced by the community, the time of the
history of the civilisation which supports and oppresses us.
In its turn the time of human events, of short or long duration,
becomes part of the very long, almost eternal time of nature.
The artist creates works on the basis of this significance,
by choosing historical or mythical images of an ancient or
even primordial origin, and combining them with materials associated
with the present time, almost without any past.
The appearance of the face of a Greek god in a modern composite-material
arrangement creates a surreal effect, where images mix as they
do in dreams. The psychological intertwining is based on the
conviction that life is not improvised, but continues as an
essential part of the past. The piece titled Kronos is an iron
frame supporting the two globes of an hourglass ; the lower
sphere encloses the head of the bronze sculpture of Poseidon
from the Fifth century found in the National Museum of Athens,
one of the noblest faces of classic antiquity. The preparatory
work is extraordinary. T. Bialecka has made a plaster copy
of the head of Poseidon, who is Neptune, the personification
of the sea, of water ; she has buried it in the ground, leaving
it there for five years, under the turf, to be corroded and
consumed. Then she has dug it up again. In the bottom of the
hourglass we see, as a drop in human form, the face of the
old water god, eroded by the soil.
The recovery of something distant and profound not only concerns
the cultural contents of a historical period, but the primordial
one of the unconscious. It is a matter of Archetypes, or in
other words the mythical images which, while staying the same,
pass through different places and times, and which remind us
with deep voices of some needs essential for our existence.
One of these archetypal images is of an evanescent metal, quicksilver.
Operative and technical requirements have subsequently made
the artist replace the quicksilver, a heavy, shiny and mobile
liquid, with an aggregate of steel marbles which also form
a heavy, shiny and moving mass. As to the significance of quicksilver,
it is indispensable to quote a book by C.G. Jung : Transfer
Psychology, 1946, part II, comment to the Rosarium Philosophorum,
chapter I, The quicksilver source. The author states : “This
liquid substance with all its paradoxical properties represents
the unconscious which is projected in it. The sea is its static
condition, the source where it starts, the process its transformation”.
In chapter IV he returns to the mythical idea of quicksilver, “psychic
substance which we today define as unconscious psyche”.
We perceive it as charged with all possibilities and vital
energies.
In the 20th century the recovery of mythology, not for purposes
of conservation but as an interior animation and meditative
revival, has above all been staged by the Surrealists (and
by Picasso: he arrived almost everywhere) . Tamara Bialecka
has perceived its value. She has broken through the aggressive
sadness of the machine without any past, headed for danger
and love of life. The representation of time has become an
expectation, a future.
Giuseppe Curonici
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