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Magda Blasinska’s ‘Unfolded’ unveiled at the Artist’s new Exhibition of Paintings
By verity healey
verity writes on theatre for Theatre Bubble and Exeunt and short stories and poetry on her blog Unintentional Hermits. She is a film maker and facilitator for Cineclub.
4 large canvases hang on opposing walls. They form the core of this exhibition and explore the artist’s main preoccupations with film, theatre, floating form, balance and the notion of the canvas as a window. Around them are 10 smaller works, experimental in style and leaning towards abstract figuration.
Inspired by an obsession with Federico Garcia Lorca and music, Blasinska confuses the viewer with folding surfaces that spring onto the canvas in a mass of sculpted shapes. In Teaser, dense cloud like matter gives birth to a singular finger of gold, touching, godlike, the 3/4 blank linen canvas. Or is it lightning cutting through an anxious earth?
In answer and calling to it, Etude reflects a silence and an echo to calm Teaser’s angst. Inspired by the artist’s love for Chopin, it plays with the viewer’s need for order and balance and perception of the abstract. Tension arises out of the use of traditional thirds and the law of the golden section. Although the work seems timeless, it is also of time and in a ghostly fashion- the floating forms give rise to feelings of a deserted boat abandoned in a haze of a lake at the bottom of a dense wood, but this idea is immediately confounded by other frames within frames [perhaps cinematic ones] and a notion of structural architectural form set against a more poetical landscape.
Taken in tandem with each other, Teaser and Etude might seem to explore the beginning of time and its chaos, and a more man made renaissance like era.
Completing the quartet are the colossal Gooseberry Gardens and Little Sparta, a response to The Garden of Ian Hamilton Finlay. They oppose and complement each other through dynamic form and movement.
Little Sparta is of a place but it represents the artist’s own inner response to the masterful pre Socractic views of the nature of the world expounded by Finlay. The viewer is lulled into a false sense of security with an evenly proportioned landscape, which is offset and dashed through by a build-up of amassed greens [the artist is currently obsessed and confronted by green, to the extent she smells it as a ‘dark forest green’] and a dancing under-painted figure mindful of Edvard Munch’s Red Virginia Creeper- except the creeper here is green blue ivy and serves as an effective false proscenium, which we can half see through and expect to be drawn back to reveal the scene beyond.
In contrast, Gooseberry Gardens is a battlefield of frozen forms and undulating masses, in pictorial conflict with its title, and an example of the artist’s interest in translating natural landscapes into their most primal impressions in order to express their inherent materiality and form. Gooseberry Gardens is a solitary cast bearing colour, light and conflict- there is a familiar green and the architecture of shapes, the flats and buildings of them, are brutalist and at war.
The artist’s preoccupations are many layered, and like Peter Doig and Mamma Andersson, her current influences, she reflects on painterly ambiguity and juxtaposition. Choice of canvas grain and depth of canvas frame are the first decisions the artist makes. Her work is iconic and within her smaller paintings, there exists an inherent religious undertone [Glass Cabin, Flagellation of St. Anthony with its cacophony of frames within frames, Lowry like blurted landscapes, almost surreal in nature] and an interest in pictorial representation [Conversation and Untitled].
In all her works there is the feeling that the canvas is a stage and some ritual is about to unfold, and though the scenes seem narrative-less, they give rise to story, emotion and impression by the complex arrangement of shapes.
But as an expression of the artist and perhaps as a statement, Charcoal to Charcoal dominates the smaller works. A creamy white spiral like mass throws itself against a collective darkness, as if in a shout at existence. It is both figurative [compositionally one is reminded of Munch’s The Scream] abstract and dramatic.
It’s not a surprise then, to learn that the artist works in a spontaneous and intuitive manner, whilst exploring an interest in rough and classical beauty. It will be very interesting to see more of the artist’s work as she develops her themes and preoccupations in a direct response to the environment around her.
Unfolded continues at the Ridgmount Centre, 8 Ridgmount Street, London, WC1E 7AA until 10th June [including Sunday], 10am-6.30pm
