At the Beach

Martyna Wolanin

Martyna Wolanin’s paintings are immediately delightful. Her material is personal: memories of times with family and friends that she lays down in paint. The acrylics are thickly daubed, evoking a labour of love. Their effect is deliberate and pixelated. Figures will look toward or away from us, as in photographs. 

The simplicity of these paintings belies beguiling insight. The artist employs various technical conceits to interrogate how one looks at the past. Figures will, in fact, become clearer when the viewer stands at a greater distance from the works, paralleling the distance of retrospect, through which experiences become clearer to use. Sometimes she uses diptychs, splitting the painting between two halves: manifesting the understanding (present) of the experience (past), that complement each other, but don’t totally match up: an affecting duality, this layering of looking. The works remain slightly blurred, with information partially withheld. These painted scenes contain the knowledge that you can’t replicate the past, but take comfort in the insight that the present gleans from it.