Zachęta Project Room

curator: Magda Kardasz
collaboration: Karolina Bielawska

Converter is a painting-cum-musical project of two young artists. The exhibition does not try to settle the question of the primacy of painting or music. It is rather a free dialogue of two artists representing various fields of art, an attempt to establish communication between them. Agata Kus’s and Michał Dymny’s artistic attitudes are linked by an intuitive approach to the creative process which admits an element of improvisation.

In the exhibition, Agata Kus displays new narrative images that elaborate on the earlier series of children portraits. The scenes are framed in such a way so as to arouse the viewers’ anxiety, knocking them off the safe tracks of thinking about representational art by marking/cutting rhomboid shapes out of rectangular painting or physically mutilating the paintings (or characters depicted therein) by burning holes on the surface of canvas with a cigarette. All the paintings at the Zachęta Project Room exhibition were painted with an ISA harp hooked up and sound samples created by Michał Dymny. When painting, the artist cut across infra-red beams and activated sounds, which in turn produced a musical notation of the painting process with all its nuances and volatility. The viewer will be able to listen to the sound illustration of each of the paintings displayed at the exhibition.

Both artists cooperated enjoying freedom in the selection of their themes. Kus showed draft paintings to Dymny, while he gathered a collection of sounds in the process of recording the electric guitar that, as he says, ‘was an abstract reflection of what he saw in the paintings.’ This feedback of image and music was made possible thanks to the ISA Harp built by Peter Sych — an electronic instrument in the form of a rectangular frame used to mix recordings. The harp is controlled by a special computer programme. Piotr Madej has created the harp’s new software specially for Kus and Dymny’s project.

The film documentation illustrating the process of creating the other images in the exhibition can be seen in the lower area of the gallery. It includes the recordings of Kus’s painting session and Dymny’s music sessions that she recorded and mixed. Agata Kus made the last painting in front of an audience at the vernissage.