NADIA LESNIAREK

On Painting

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I like melodies and long drawn out sounds, I like dancing, stretching out my body with friends, feeling joy and rhythmic movement. Singing loudly makes me feel free. When I paint I like being surprised, I even like being disappointed, sometimes, because it’s unexpected, because I feel like my emotions are pulling in on a rollercoaster with the work that could go in any direction. I like to have some intention and then it be disrupted somehow. Then something new comes out of it, or I have to swerve, pivot and react. I like to create chaos and then pull the threads into something coherent, or create something structured and then ‘chaoticise’ it. I like to watch dying inks bleed unreservedly out of their places and then mourn as they fade. To find that one special point in time of ‘fade’ that allows the brighter colours to really ‘pop’, when I find it so hard not to fill every inch with vivid colours. When I’m seeking only positive feelings or vivid ‘intense colours’ I need circumstance to serve up that special ‘faded’ chroma. I like mirroring and repetition. A body mirrored feels to me like a structure, it takes on an architectural quality, and sometimes the arms become buttresses and make the body feel more stable, perhaps overly stable (I know I am risk-adverse). There’s something so stable and satisfying about a body that is held by so much. Like the opposite of a cantilever - in architectural words - which is hovering, feels unnerving, I almost want more columns, then also a heavy solid foundation. I like repeating bodies that converge into one another, like my double vision, yes, but taking things apart, putting them back together pushing them to a point of almost-non-recognition. When the body converges it becomes like a beautiful monster. When it’s repeated and converged again it takes on a pattern-like quality. Between monster and pattern. This is me ‘chaoticising’ something structured. But it’s not just that. I like to create a ‘feeling’ in the painting. Maybe that’s this ‘stability’ that some would say is a calm, or a ‘balance’ feeling. But sometimes in rolling foetal forms or ‘whooshing’ wide brush strokes I want to make a feeling of movement, of rolling, floating or dancing and muscles becomes strained or flaccid. I want to paint that feeling of freedom of dancing and singing.

I want to paint the drones and melodies. Of edges becoming sticky - like honey where, once connected they thicken and the in-between corners are curved - like stained glass or the furniture on a boat. I want to sit in amongst sticky edges that form pebbles between them, volcanic, geological or like salt pan evaporation ponds. I remember finding this lake for the first time. I was researching a substance, mapping it across ‘spatial and temporal boundaries’. I chose Botulinum Toxin, or Botox, it can be used in tiny doses, to cause or cure my condition, diplopia, or double vision. I followed this substance to a lake, the largest site where C. Botulinum flourishes naturally, dangerously in static water, in anaerobic conditions. Sambar Lake, it’s a salt lake, with human-made evaporation ponds that look like beautiful glazed tiles of changing colours from above. The colours change throughout the year based on the amount of oxygen in them, the bacteria using the pigments and sunlight to breathe. First greens then, bright fluorescent pinks and oranges and then to deep reds and purples. The pigments are part of the salt infrastructure. And as the water evaporates it leaves a crust at its edge, over and over like contour lines of a landscape or a muscle. Anaerobic means low oxygen, which makes me think of the word aerobic which is rhythmic exercise using large muscle groups, this makes me think of synchronised swimming. My friend said that these half-evaporated salt pans look like a cut-up piece of meat. I like the fact that I see figures everywhere, there’s a word for this - Pareidolia. It’s hard not to relate everything to the body. I enjoy putting figures in my paintings because I feel like I am those figures. The rolling bodies in foetal positions resting, sleeping, or the stretching opening-out forms. I think I feel a muscular or mood-based empathy with the position of an arm or the tilt of a neck. I like layering textures (which is why I combine acrylics inks and oils), or strokes and placing different opacities of paint beside one another so it feels like one is coming to the edge of a precipice, of one of those old maps where a crumpled line meets a space called ‘the unknown’. Or where dense clay meets porous chalk and the water is forced to the surface in form of a spring. Maps, geology and the body can look so alike when perceived at different scales. Like that Eames film where they zoom in on people having a picnic, so far you see abstract ‘biological’ shapes and relations, then they zoom out so far you see outer-space and it looks the same  abstract ‘biological’ shapes and relations. 

I like my paintings to look like maps, bodies, for it to be unclear if you are looking at something so zoomed in or out, that when you walk closer more is revealed, underneath layers you couldn’t perceive from afar, so slight, you discover these textural assemblages. But when you are far away it looks coherent and balanced (the chaos tamed if you like, or ‘big’ textures revealed only when closer). I used to work on facade design when I was an architect. I came up with a ‘framework’ for tiling design based on how one approached the different ‘types’ of walls: slow from afar walking towards, close up walking oblique view but fast, slow moving down an escalator looking at the panel ahead, very far across a road - just a few of the categories - it was for a large train station. I think this idea of the ‘approach’, the time spent and how this is spent became a fundamental aspect of my practice. I suppose this sense of the audience’s bodily relation to a work, or the sense of time spent observing, relates to the “Bed Folly for the Chronic Subject”, a reimagined four poster bed with a canvas of reclining friends stretched as its canopy. At the exhibition people said they felt a connection with the subjects of the painting, reclining as they did altogether, bodies held by so much. Others said they felt like they could spend more time looking at the painting because their body was in a state of rest, supported. Perhaps this brings me back to this idea of bodily stability or instability, or even gravity-impossibility - with rolling foetal forms or the impossibility of converging bodies turning into something sculptural, like that was how they were ‘supposed’ to be.