If only I could see a landscape as it is when I am not there. But when I am in any place I disturb the silence of heaven by the beating of my heart.

Simone Weil

In her essay On Style, Susan Sontag argues that art is “a thing in the world, not just a text or commentary on the world.” Encountered as art, a work is “an experience, not a statement or an answer to a question.” Sontag defines the autonomy of art as “its freedom to ‘mean’ nothing,” without precluding consideration of its function or capacity for social impact. What mediates between the work and its audience is the exhibition space. Ant Łakomsk, together with Zuzanna Kozłowska, create circumstances in which visitors are folded into the arrangement of paintings and objects installed in the space, so that the whole situation takes on the character of a covert happening—the viewers stage the act of looking at the painting. If all the elements of the exhibition are treated as props, the arranged environment poses a dialectical question—what becomes more important in the situation at hand: the surface of the work being viewed, or the relation between viewer and work? Ant Łakomsk touches only the surface of a vast reservoir of associations, incorporating fragments of it into her own works. Her borrowings, however, are closer to linguistic and semantic paraphrase than to visual methods of appropriation.

The references she draws on are often hazy, mediated by digital reproductions. The artist attempts to translate originals displayed on a phone or computer screen back into analog techniques, while simultaneously blurring the legibility of the reference. She builds connections by combining figures, spaces, and props as well as diverse painting techniques. She fuses lyrical figuration with abstract passages that take the form of graffiti, wallpaper motifs, or smoke filling the frame of the canvas. The composition achieved through the juxtaposition of quotations resembles a literary montage.

Isabelle Graw’s approach helps to structure this logic of montage and blurred reference. She proposes reading painting through the prism of Charles S. Peirce’s semiotic theory of indexicality. In addition to highlighting the inextricable bond between the artist and their work, she sets out the function of the index, which directs the viewer beyond the space of the image. The index—understood by Peirce as a sign connected to its object by contiguity or causation—points beyond the image to its sources (gesture, body, the time of the event), directing attention to what lies outside the frame. This mechanism is evident in Łakomsk’s compositions, which often hinge on fragmentary misalignment. As a result, they evoke the spectral presence of multiple authors. This kind of multiplication of the self—its insertion into a historical conglomerate—activates the ritual (sacred or secular) mode of being with the work of art that Walter Benjamin associated with its cult value.

When I look at Łakomsk’s Leisure, I think of Gwen John’s A Lady Reading (1910–1911). In John’s painting, the scene unfolds in her Paris apartment—a setting she returned to repeatedly. John painted two versions of the painting—in the first, the depicted figure’s features were modeled on the Virgin Mary as depicted in Albrecht Dürer’s woodcut Annunciation from the Life of the Virgin series, whereas in the later 1911 iteration the figure bears the artist’s own face. Duplication does not, however, function as a supplement to self-representation—the artist treats the figures, regardless of any resemblance to her own likeness, as vessels that become spaces for dialogue with the legacy of earlier generations of painters. The essence of both of John’s paintings is less the capture of any autobiographical truth than the record of the formation of her artistic identity.

Ant Łakomsk evinces similar aims, immortalizing figures in her paintings. These are flashes and glimmers in the form of laconic portraits, depicting subjects suspended within claustrophobic compositions. The artist depicts figures at a moment of a cer tain absence, a detachment from the body—as they think, read, or dream distant worlds. The figures in the paintings are phantoms that embody references to art history.

Franciszek Smoręda

Photos by Bartek Zalewski.