Corpus: A Presentation of Bodies by Stanislas Sławomir Blatton

About

There is nothing tame or genteel about these watercolours.  The dribbles, bleeds, stains, puddles, blooms of the medium become equivalents for mottled, pulsating, historiated skin; for breathing, flexing, sagging, emotional flesh. Watercolour becomes both metaphoric and metonymic of body fluids and flows.  The gestural movements of the medium register shifting rhythms and exchanges of bodily energies between artist and model.

On one level, this corpus presents tight conceptual and material seriality.  All works consist of rich watercolour worked into thick handmade paper, A1 format.  All works represent anonymous, naked female models, detached from specific contexts of time and place. None of these works, Studies for a Figure, are distinguished through titles or dates.  None of the bodies appear to drive outwards from standing poses but explore myriad extensions from compressed or horizontal positionality, although none are visibly grounded.  The repetitive folding and unfolding of bodies come from performances enacted in private space, beyond normative social codes.  The re-presentation of the bodies, detached from context, enhances a sense of liminality.  Made to float on the white ground of the paper, the gravitational pulls which contoured their forms on the floor of the studio, are now released, furthering corporeal potentiality for bodily becoming.

From a Polish heritage, Blatton has, characteristically, drawn strategies from European Expressionism: the heightened colour, gestural marks, figurative distortions used by early 20th century male artists such as Egon Schiele, Kokoshka and George Grosz.  However, his training in the Warsaw Academy of art in the 1960s, early 70s, happened at a time of progressive cultural politics which led to engagement with the critical and subversive practices of performance, conceptual art and counter-cultural politics of feminism.  Unlike Schiele’s nudes which are pinned down by incisive lines drawn from a lingering voyeuristic gaze, Blatton’s bodies are fully performative and participatory; unruly, grotesque bodies which palpitate vibrantly; continually morphing between states and identities.  In this respect, his work has something in common with the highly speculative figuration of contemporary female artists such as Wangechi Mutu and Ellen Gallagher whose practices have responded to recent posthumanist thinking about identity as hybrid, multiple, nomadic.