Everyday Details
There is nothing more deceptive than discovering the world solely through the visible. There is nothing more reliable than its description by fragments of impressions, senses, symbols and trivial everyday details.
Andrzej Szczepantak
It is vital to experience feelings ever and ever again, get in touch with the matter, the body, to repeat them and discover their new meanings. Further, it is important to build up one's own microcosm, shape its image based on these experiences and memory traces marked by these relations.
Marzena Nowak has been building her own world with diagrams. She covers large canvases with them. They form mega-spatial constellations. She has been using sewing patterns, stellar constellations, colored scraps of bed sheets, torn tights. She has also made mobile pictures, filmed simple gestures, bodily fragments, the time consuming drawing process, water or carpet patterns. These are very subtle pictures. Dream projections and registration of feelings. Their constant repetitiveness.
The films by Marzena Nowak are extremely intimate. The repetitions of short film sequences cover a multiple meaning sense of feelings. This is not merely a description of feelings remebered from her youth, personal experiences or dreams, or relations with those close to her. We are faced here with short lasting emotion impressions, the emotions related to her own self, to both the real and unreal world, the world lost for ever. These comments on the past can be sad or full of joy, sometimes they are fun, sometimes they are scary. Perceiving life by looking back, repetitive penetrations of own memories, have always been risky.
The patterns by Nowak are abstract pictures. They tell a lot about the body. They are searching for its presence, its limits, its unique shape. One will not come across two identical patterns in these precise complicated constellations. Small scraps of bed sheets are bringing back the memory about him.
The films by Marzena Nowak are centered around body details. They depict its contact with the matter, object, they show border crossing. The simple, quite often monotonous gestures, as though they were attempts to register a touch, encourage an onlooker to remember the accompanying passing emotions, and above all - to memorize them. This is why this process has been constantly renewed, endlessly repeated. Perhaps the time will come for this experience perception.
The films by Marzena Nowak are quiet. Watching them, one has a sense of intensive silence; as though she was whispering. She uses a subtle, very delicate language. Regardless of the meaning content, they are mild and soft. These are extremely quiet impressions. There is no pushing, aggression, unnecessary effects or attacking the audience.
Nowak has been experimenting with the body. She is the object of her introspection (A Throat, Mouth Rummaging, A Belly Button, A Mouth, An Eye). She is both an object and subject of the artistic search. She pays a lot of attention to the details such as eye lashes and fingers with visible epidermal ridges, applying mirror reflections and personal photographs. Her black and white movies have a touch of the colored dream poetics, the body and matter relation analysis suspended in time, a touch of transitory states of her inner self. There is also the biographic archeology. The conversion. The constant renewal. The search for a thread.
The pictures by Marzena Nowak are modest with regard to her workmanship. With a carbon paper and coal, she makes black prints on white picture under-layers. The most famous astronomic diagram is Hertzsprung-Russel diagram with the imposed brightness (a known star quantity) and the stellar colors ranging from the high temperature white and blue stars to the low temperature red stars.
Recently, Marzena Nowak has started to introduce basic colors into her patterns. The Absolut Nowak project shows flue for the first time, the latest works - red.
Marzena Nowak is serious about her work. There is no place for irony, so typical of many young artists. Her search is true, reliable, with no corrections. She accepts her own mistakes, unavoidable in a tangle of lines, symbols and patterns. This simple, at the same time direct, way of learning the world involves an important factor, namely memory. The memory is her basic creative tool, and a creative act is a sort of fixing the resultant of the present feelings with the ones remembered from childhood.