The Perfection of Play, Eleanora Kupencow
Marek Bartelik
Art results in unexpected encounters or, perhaps, it is the other way around:
unexpected encounters result in art. For Eleanora Kupencow such an encounter
was with the Polish author and artist Bruno Schulz (1892-1942) through his writings.
Or does this meeting between Kupencow and Schultz just appear “unexpected”
to me, because their artistic expressions totally differ? “Childhood, to
Schulz,” Kupencow wrote down in her journal, “is a stage whereon each
sensation is accompanied by an inventive act of imagination, when reality, not
yet systematized by experience, ‘submits’ to new associations, assumes
the forms suggested to it, and comes to life fecund with dynamic visions; childhood
is a stage when etiological myths are born at every step.” Discussing the
idea of “re-entering” childhood, Kupencow concluded: “Art allows
us to remain in this playground of childhood, since art is the perfection of
play.”
Schulz, obviously, did not “re-enter” childhood—in any case, not
as a conventional way to regain “innocence.” He did not overtly seek
it, either in his prose or in his sexually explicit, fetishistic drawings and
graphic works. But one might argue that Kupencow, like Schultz, and a preponderance
of artists for that matter, treats art as a magical, cathartic experience that
provides entrée to a fantasy world. To paraphrase the Polish poet Adam
Zagajewski, Kupencow looks for opportunities to transform the trivial and provincial
Drohobycz, a birthplace from which one attempts to depart one day, into the worldly
eastern Baghdad as a city of a personal A Thousand and One Nights. Then, as if
following a circular trajectory, art becomes iconic (e.g., it embodies that to
which it refers), taking the world to a natural confinement—the picture
frame.
“Your colors are Polish”—Kupencow was told by her art teacher
Evsa Model. She herself confirmed that observation during her trip to Poland
in the early 1980s. “The Polish love to use magenta and orange along with
red, as I do.” Apart from a particular “Polish” tonality to her
work, which, in fact, varies quite significantly from painting to painting and
has been recently enriched by silver and gold, Kupencow’s art displays a
strong affinity with Polish folklore. Pristine expressive pattern and blazing
colors in her works can be also found in the glass paintings from the Podhale
region in the Tatra Mountains and the paper cut-outs snipped with sheep shears
by women in different parts of Poland. Artists tend, however, to absorb visual
stimuli in a free way. Kupencow credits Islamic miniatures, Christian illuminated
manuscripts, Coptic textiles, and Northwest Coast Indian art for infusing her
imagination with their combination of distinctive ornamentation and evanescent
beauty. Her strong interest in applied arts goes back to her childhood, when
“making things was a good thing to do” and “dipping Easter eggs
in dye was the closest our family ever came to painting.”
Kupencow’s works hit the viewer with their formal directness and boldness
that verge on the outrageous. They are flat, geometricized, and closely packed
with forms wrapped around each other in a space divided into distinctive positive
and negative (foreground and background) areas. Dwarfed, abstracted creatures,
often abbreviated to their upper bodies or just their faces, fill out a canvas
or a piece of paper. Kupencow simplifies the narrative trope, or turns it into
a visual pun, allowing free-associations. She returns to the same motifs: figures
in landscape and faces. Her images radiate a genuine fascination with re-drawing
forms, which because of her wild imagination are not predictable and tenuous,
even when they appear as close variations on ones already known from Kupencow’s
other works. It seems as in her approach to art making, the artist aims at surprising
herself by finding new permutations of previously explored imagery, and while
conjuring them—she surprises the viewer.
Kupencow’s world is perfectly balanced, despite being made of a mosaic of
forms rendered in kaleidoscopic colors. But it is full of tension, as her forms
often sharply pierce and enter into each other, suggesting violence. Her emblematic
Caterpillar Dinosaurus Rex, 1999, for example, is a bestiary with bizarre creatures
part from ancient myths and part from a museum of natural history, while a primordial
landscape that surrounds them evokes a cosmic scenery. In a multipanel work entitled
Three Heads in Space, 1998, a human face looks like a placid mask to disguise
multiple personalities; as all masks do, it reveals rather than conceals. While
pushing her artistic idiom towards satirical effect, in works such as Three Mummies
Crossing the River Styx, 1999, Kupencow defies a glib, cartoonish quality by
making them look archaic. Texturing her images with “energy lines,”
as she calls her curving brushstrokes placed in rhythmic patterns, Kupencow enhances
the painterly quality in her art. She paints with oils thinned with turpentine,
which she applies to paper or canvas, then finishes with varnish, treating her
images with care and respect.
Schulz’s unorthodox interpretation of telekinesis provides an intriguing
explanation for the fusion of violence and tenderness in numerous works of art.
Schulz defined telekinesis as a visceral phenomenon of experiencing and expressing
physical and psychic sensations in life as if they were happening on one’s
skin. The surface of a piece of paper or canvas provides a substitute for skin
in art. Considering the need for release through art—a need that surges
as a guiding force for Kupencow’s creative endeavor of the last thirty years—Schulz
made a cognitive leap by writing, “The possibility suggests itself that
no dreams, however absurd or senseless, are wasted in the universe.” Kupencow’s
paintings evoke, perhaps, the wildest of dreams, coming from a desire to perfect
her play.
Marek Bartelik, writer and art critic lives in New York and teaches art history
at Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.
