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This cycle of black-and-white drawings is rendered in a technique akin to the Renaissance experience of drawing with a silver needle on a dark background. This collection of works is part of a large cycle titled Mystic Symbols of Infancy / Invisible Silence. As such, it is displayed in a room with specifically formed units – installations, which showcase certain symbols and meanings. They have in common the visual property of the technique of white spaces on a dark background, first established in European culture during the Renaissance. For the most up-to-date signs of urban and pop culture as well as for the symbolic representations of the most ancient civilizations of the Maya, Aztec, Aborigines and the like, this technique provides identical visual semantics. It manifests the universal quality of the black-and-white representation of form (defined in almost sculptural terms) as an idea permeated with the energy of the topic of childhood and the common visual property of the contrast between the light and the dark evoked by these drawings. Some of the drawings led to sculptural forms as installations created according to these drawings, but in matt black color in white illuminated glass boxes – akin to three-dimensional negative of these specific quotations of the drawing practice.

“Regarding the exploration of the universal symbols of infancy found also in other cultures and on the most ancient continents, I have come across very similar symbols of the pantheon of mythical and other-worldly elements binding together the subconscious on the collective level into an intricate and indissoluble thematic whole that constitutes the universal aspects of growing up, of courage and the relationships between good and evil. It is important to emphasize that these mythical tales, legends and fables occur in the conscious or unconscious minds of children in the earliest period of growing up, not only in the relationships of the experiential perception and visualization, but also on the level of dreams and their symbols. This opens a new area for the synthesis and analysis of connections on the level of the relationships between European fairy tales and stories and Indonesian, Japanese, Bushman and Aboriginal legends and their oral lore” (Author’s words).

 

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