“Reborn” represents a wave, an oil painting on a horizontal canvas, 80×240 cm. Starting from its physical definition, a wave indicates a disturbance that arises from a specific source and propagates in time and space, transporting energy or momentum.

It expresses the dynamism, the force and the vibration specific to the wave phenomenon. The gaze pierces the water that rises, approaches and descends back to the viewer, seeking to transcend the space of vision into a feeling of internalization. Behind the image, water appeals to the fluidity of bodies, and suggests the possibility of adapting, transforming and generating metamorphoses. This possibility is intended to be a metaphor for a more general, vital situation, which applies to our sensitive language in an ancestral, archetypal vision of water.
Purification. Initiation. Modification. All origin myths involve water and its benefits. Here, the title evokes and implies the possibility of a renewal, of a rebirth specific to several cultures that, since ancient times and up to the present day, attribute to water, both maritime and river, a symbolic meaning.
“Reborn” is part of a new series of canvases produced between 2012 and 2013, which focus on the power of the landscape, on the horizon, on branching, on fluidity, on change. The canvas plays with the pictorial material and pierces the element. At the heart of light, transparency reveals reflection, diffraction and dispersion. Nature is intended to be a speculum, a mirror of human impulses and instincts.
In an era increasingly remote from spontaneous “feeling”, cut off from nature, in an ecological drift that frightens future generations because of the limiting situation in which we find ourselves, the wave is emerging as an object of representation and reflection of man in the face of his relationship with nature and the elements.
We carry within us the memory of water, rivers, woods, a memory that acts as an animal reminder, of which we are largely made up. The pictorial form therefore allows us to listen to this “outside of language”, the invisible of the signum, which makes us rediscover the presence of the sensitive. The image depicts an event and an emotion of being in the world that shows its finiteness, in the face of the multifaceted, infinite and perpetual course of nature.
The result is a thought associated with its limits, which questions and experiences the possibility of overcoming its limits through violent, immediate beauty, without intermediation and without prohibitions. Beauty doesn't need excuses. It is meant to be expressed through the pictorial gesture, in the contact and friction between the canvas and the brush. The color, the blue of the wave, the white of the foam, becomes dense, thick, the vivid presence of emotional thought.
Beyond its metaphysical scope, the idea of fluidity represented by the wave acquires social meaning, and questions our modern society.
In his book published in 2006, “Liquid Life”, the Polish sociologist Zygmund Bauman recently proposed a definition of “liquid” modernity and identity to describe our current society.
Beyond this societal vision of modernity, the wave represented on the canvas is intended to be a challenge in the times to come. Everything is changing, Pánta Rhêi (pfâng‎), suggests this wave, and it does not want to lead to a critical reading and a break with the past. Rather, it seeks to capture continuity and to reveal the capacity for adaptation, modification and regeneration specific to the “liquid” nature of man.

Paulina Spiechowicz, 2013.
Art historian, poet and novelist.