UCIELEŚNIENIE by Paweł Korab Kowalski is much more than body painting. It is painting with the body and, ultimately, the embodiment of painting itself. A painting takes shape on a woman’s body, while the painter himself becomes a body that paints. In this liberating gesture, he embodies the primordial unity of the material and the spiritual, the lost bond between the world and the image. He does not wish to be a philosopher and, unlike much contemporary artistic production, does not replace representation with discourse. Nor does he wish to remain the craftsman he has been since the beginning of art history, for he no longer hides behind his creation. Instead, he reveals what happens behind the scenes, shows his workshop and tools, and deconstructs the world he has just brought into being. Ucieleśnienie is self-referential “painting about painting”, yet—an idea as original as it is paradoxical—it is entangled not in language but in corporeality.

At first, the surface is flat, uniform and snow-white. Only a faint outline distinguishes the model from the background, marking the place of a future event. Gradually, the body emerges from the depths of white; with each brushstroke it acquires shape and strengthens its material presence. The boundary of the body is the boundary of representation: the painting stays within the frame of the image, yet its bold graphic divisions transcend the form imposed on it. Figuration and abstraction meet in a dynamic weave that evokes magical rituals. The corpus becomes an ancient suit of armour—a cuirasse esthétique—and a postmodern mannequin, while the world of mythical stories flows into fashion and lifestyle. The gesture is thoroughly surrealist, yet through its expressive repetition the work strangely acquires the precision of a minimalist poster.

Each brushstroke is documented in a photograph. Any one of these may be the unique image, if it captures what the others have missed and embodies the moment of fulfilment. Each painting produces several hundred photographs, assembled frame by frame in post-production into a stop-motion film. This records the history of successive artistic incarnations and the thousands of decisions intended to lead to the desired goal. It is valuable material for studying the creative process, but also for reversing it, removing its irreversible character and depriving the final gesture of its power to conclude. Art, as we know, is a choice of one value among thousands of possibilities. Ucieleśnienie is such a choice, seeking to bring out all the rejected possibilities and thereby give a real form to something abstract.

PIOTR SEWERYN ROSÓŁ