Katarzyna Łyszkowska

What can I afford… (2008-2010)

Program: Vernissage Pavilion B Friday (19.03) 09:00 p.m.

Katarzyna Łyszkowska – born in 1981 in Olsztyn,AD at the Department of Drawing, doneat the Department of Fine Arts at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń.

I remember The Magic Pencil from my childhood. I adored that story. All the children from the kindergarten dreamed about such a gem. A pencil, owing an extraordinary quality of materializing everything you draw with it, kept me awake at night. TV awakens our need of possession starting from the youngest years.

This need led me – a preschooler – to unconscious manipulation of the reality. My grandpa showed me, that if I cover the whole surface of a sheet of paper with a pencil, I will get a magically sparkling surface. That effect could have been obtained only with the use of my grandpa Genek’s special Chinese pencils. It was not hard to believe it, as my grandpa was able to do a lot of magic tricks, i.a. fill empty salad bowls with sweets from jungle, which after many years I found to be raisins, or stroking an invisible cat which evaded from his arms always whenever I wanted to scratch it.

Coming back to the point, my grandpa Genek kept his magic pencils in his cocktail cabinet. One day I asked him to lend me such a pencil so I could take it to a kindergarten and show it to my colleagues. Next day my dream came true and my status in the peers' group rose. Everyone wanted to draw with my pencil. I was so proud… I was so glamour… Two days later, in a magic way, a pencil disappeared from my locker…

Today my pencil does not have to be Chinese to be magic. Today I can afford its magic…

Collected in a stylistic order, miracles of the world of a micro scale, the most exquisite inventions of human desires – the most famous perfumes, the most expensive bags, women’ beautiful feet’s most wanted shoes – that view charms, fondles, lifts… Where? Or maybe more important question – where from?

A personal motif. Following the trace of memory a magic pencil is brought back – a magic object made in China, with which you can draw everything, everything, and have everything in the widest sense of this word. An important motif of the master of small magicians – grandpa Eugeniusz.

An endemic motif. Being very well described by Dorota Masłowska who writes about the foamed polystyrene cities, cartoon cars and cardboard people, and about a luxury scratched and made to fit. A critical motif. Invariably blind obsession with luxury, fetishisation of things marked with an appropriate logo. Perverse answer for Delvoye's pigs. Simulating a possession of something one does not have is not a regular manipulation. When a new form, adopting the parameters of a phenomenon that it imitates, starts playing its prototype role, it also absorbs its soul to some extent. A simulation is finished with the birth of a new being. A motif of royalty apotheosis. For men, prestige tastes like the royal power. Luxurious things that bring self-confidence to the women who use them. They disclose their internal female royal power. They become the attribute of majesty. Do we deal only with the reconstruction of social images about luxury and happy life? We cannot be sure about the scope of the irony in this project. And if there is not so much of it? All worlds are in a way artificial worlds (Wolfgang Welsch) but is artificial the antithesis of real? The moments of passion are the most important, they are timeless.

Przemek Pintal