Oil on canvas, 100 x 110 cm, signed back 'If I can't have | presence, I prefer | Future | 2019 | Magda Sokolowska'.
"Alternative stories...
Magda Sokolowska is my next story. Reality is sustained by an incoherent multiplicity of fantasies, of unfathomable density. In fantasy, we experience a stronger sense of reality. When its level is shifted a bit, one can experience unique elevating effects. Art with its illusion violates and interferes with the very dreams, the hidden fantasies that form the unofficial core of our lives.
A lie repeated a number of times becomes the truth. A truth more interesting and truthful than what we came out of, once there. What is truth? A reality? An entity? That which historically happens and is recorded? The fantasies, the visions I live with also really exist, they are part of me. And they are every day. Why doesn't anyone write down the history of illusions? After all, they are an integral part of every human being.
Alternate histories, however twisted, always say a lot about reality. We will see more of it in illusion than in direct contact. About desires that are not threatened by ethical consequences, about existential pain, about the impossibility of reconciling the dualistic paradox in which human beings are ordered to function - the mundane, materialistic duty of survival to nature, and something completely different that has been called soul, spirituality, some higher need for the Sublime. This constant clash between these two spheres provokes huge layers of rift, sadness. "Impossibility", "longing", are constant companions. It also causes surprises, sudden flashes of happiness. Convulsive, even - by the way, the perfect term borrowed by Andre Breton in "Nadia."
Playing with appearances can be perversely dangerous. Especially when one loses sight of the established order. I have the faces of Madeleine and Judie from Hitchcock's "Vertigo" before my eyes. Madeleine pretended by Judie, Scottie, who loves Madeleine in Judie's version - he loves neither the real Madeleine nor the real Judie, but Madeleine in the person of Judie. For him, a pretend Madeleine is more real. And further I see the words of Slavoj Zizek "The point is not to find in fantasy the sign of reality, but vice versa - to find in "reality" itself the sign of an "illusory" mental universe."
Fantasy is still an untapped tool. A tool to deceive reality, to carve a breach in it and escape for a moment, beyond the spiral of time. And return in a new version.
Art is a wonderful field - it is more than reality, it is an idea. It is more than a copy of reality, it is the WHOLE - the IDEA of reality is found more in the copy than in the original. ""Artistic beauty" is a disguise in which the abyss of the Real Thing is revealed," he said.
I show my work as Magda Sokolowska on Instagram and at the Student Furnace Gallery in Poznan.
P.S. Slavoj Zizek with his reflections on psychoanalysis, films, art, Lacan, play a big role in this story, here they are reflected in the experience through a female prism."
