CONTEMPORARY PORTRAIT

Exhibition ,,CONTEMPORARY PORTRAIT.'', Tymczasowa Art Gallery, Warsaw, Poland, 2018.

,,CONTEMPORARY PORTRAIT – narrativeness and realism.”, October/November 2018, Tymczasowa Art Gallery. 

Artists: Klaudia Ka /Hugo Silva

Curator: Joanna Pongowska

Text & photo credits: Joanna Pongowska

Artistic portrait and self-portrait located in a specific space-time is one of the most interesting forms of documenting the image of a human from centuries. Throughout the years techniques, forms, philosophy and artists are changing, thanks to this, we learn about the history of many significant portrayed people. The exhibition presents the works of Klaudia Ka and Hugo Silva – artists whose paintings invite the viewer to pause for a moment and look closely at the other human being – the world in which he was captured, gesture, moment, dynamic, emotional or silent fraction of life, detained on canvas. Both artists portray a human, each of them approaches the subject in a completely different way in terms of a content, philosophy and the selection of artistic medias of expression.

The narrative and figurative paintings by Klaudia Ka visualize the relationship between human and nature. The figures portrayed by the artist are always located in nature, coexisting and permeating in the symbiosis of life. The artist notices the common stages of life for human and nature – birth, life, death, their biology, harmony, infiltration, unpredictability and mysticism. The uniqueness of nature spirit frozen in the painitings of Klaudia Ka, together with the portrayed person co-creates an intimate story. The paintings are stopping us and transferring to another world, in which human being is an integral part of the element of nature, being almost united with it. The woman is the dominant character of Klaudia Ka’s paintings. The individual paintings are notes from life, observations of the nature, other people, as well as artist herself. Klaudia Ka often portrays herself in her paintings – self-portraits are very personal, full of hidden emotions, they convey the universal truth, moment, thought, experience – presenting an intimate fraction of life captured on the canvas. In some works surrealistic elements or surprising compositions in a symbolic way visualize the process of transformation or integration of portrayed characters. Specific reverie, calmness, contemplation and the search for inner harmony is very characteristic in Klaudia Ka’s art.

Hyperrealistic and magnetizing portraits by Hugo Silva form the series of ,,Gestures’’, focused on the human and the dynamics of his character – emotions, gestures, and experiences. The artist focuses on the portrait, showing emotions, feelings, melancholy and mystery. The character is removed from the social context and practically isolated. The artist is interested in the relationship between photography and painting. Light and color is an important factor for Hugo Silva. He paints in layers – classic techniques of oil painting – and also alla prima, applying translucent and semi- translucent layers of colors to an opaque sub-picture on a wooden panel. The tradition of old painting techniques collides here with the contemporaneity, formally and conceptually. These are not classical portraits – the people painted in the pictures are captured in specifc poses – they are not static or aiming to be beautiful – they are natural, expressive, either dynamics and contemplatives. Captured during the moment when some emotional stimulations in uences them, often created in interaction with the artist. The realistic oil painting on the wood panels collide with an innovative representation of a human-image, a vivid palette of colors, a close-up of the figure, leaving the harshness of the background from the board, sometimes with geometric elements, affects the viewer in an impactful way.

Joanna Pongowska, Curator, Tymczasowa Art Gallery