Agata Bogacka: Fields of Conflict
Edel Assanti, 24 March - 30 April 2022
I couldn't open the clear glass door to the gallery. Push? No. Pull? No. I moved along to the next pane of the elegant glass front and pushed that. Nope. I kept going. The gallery assistant looked up and saw the difficulties I was having. She motioned forward with her hand. I pushed again, and this time the door opened with a heavy, satisfying whoosh.
Inside, Agata Bogacka's paintings kept this feeling of frictional momentum going. They are full of gradual transitions across the canvas from one colour to another, from dark to light and vice versa, which stop arrestingly at the boundary of another transition going a different way. Whooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo--
ssssssssssssssssssssssssshhhhhhh. The paint is flat and frank; the illusion of depth is all the more satisfying for being landscaped into a surface that is so clearly a flat plane. Your mind's eye pushes the door open, while your reason stays outside, pawing at the window.
The sense of ease is probably deceptive. Bogacka seems to have painted the transitioning colours very carefully with strokes that run perpendicular to the direction of the gradient, the colour mixing happening on the palette. This allows convincing transitions between unexpected colours, such as blue into salmon pink, as in Disagreement 5. It feels like we're being taken for a ski across the colour wheel, obliquely effacing the tracks of the skiers who came before.
This painting employs a choppy, brushed edge which suggests a landscape under a dawning sun, touched by the drama of raggedy mountain-tops. Here, as in the general opticality of the paintings, Bogacka looks to abstract modernism to inform her work. Like a Rothko, the distant, opaque and self-contained paintings are imbued with the sense of a sublime natural expanse and all the romantic feelings that this evokes.
Bogacka doesn't develop these ideas into any new conceptual directions. She just executes them well. Does this mean they're anachronistic, stuck in a past moment and failing to respond to the present moment? No. The collage-like layering of different gradients, the heightened, artificial palette and the suggestion of figuration feel fresh as anything. Here's a paradox: not worrying about your own historicity is one of the best things an artist can do right now.