A hand tangled in hair, closed eyelids, a finger put into the mouth. Reds and purples saturated with emotions, colors of desire and corporeality. Sensual tangles of bodies in Paulina Stasik’s paintings speak of the mutual complementarity and the search for love. Tongue-like objects, resembling callas with bent stems, are in turn a study of the dismemberment of the body, at the pre-unification stage.
In Plato’s “Symposium”, the main theme of which is love, Aristophanes in his speech quotes the myth of the first people. They were four-legged beings carrying both male and female elements. When in their audacity they began to build the stairs to heaven and threaten the gods, Zeus punished them and cut them in half. And since then, we have been constantly yearning for these halves and constantly looking for them, feeling the void.
In ancient times, a beautiful custom existed – to cut rings or coins and give one part of them as a souvenir to friends. Kept from generation to generation, the halves allowed descendants of their initial owners to be recognized after many years. Such an object was called ‘a symbol’ and it is the original meaning of this word. Recalling this myth, Plato believed that each of us is not a human being but a symbol that is constantly looking for the other symbol to complement it. This desire for fullness, possible only through the complementation, has always accompanied us in our search. And we are looking for love because we are filled with a feeling of imperfection and only love can make us complete again.
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The art of Paulina Stasik is a sensual search for perfection. Penetrating and sharp eyes, looking for the lost symbol. Bodies flowing as in a river current: like all these bodies flowing through our real life and in our dreams.
Only they will give us a sense of “a complete whole”.
Only with them, we are not symbols but complete beings.
(Agnieszka Gołębiewska)
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