About Galina Poloz

I work with various painting materials, exploring the possibilities of representation of perception hidden in them - not of the visual environment, but of vision itself. For me, painting is an experience that celebrates contemplation not in the objects depicted, but in the vibrations of the light and air, in the transparency of the composition and the sonority of the colour. The painting is a symbolic projection, which, like a sensitive membrane, is capable of capturing the subtle nuances of perception itself - imperceptible on functionalist levels of communication.

As an artist, I am interested in an approach to cognition that is based on intuition. According to Henri Bergson, the intuitionist method makes it possible to go beyond apperception - to see what lies beyond what is already known and adapted to the modern model of thinking. Intuition is what enables us to free ourselves from patriarchal norms, segregations and artificial ideals.

Painting in my artistic experience is in itself a form of intuitive learning and inquiry. I use materials that require a delicate approach, which I have honed in working with watercolour, with its ephemerality. I seek to capture the image not by structural similarity, but by a light touch, a flash, an imprint, as a result of which the figurative, recognisable image takes on the characteristics of a pulsating abstraction, as if opening up avenues for extrapolating new meanings - perhaps deeper than those we are used to "reading" in the world around us.

In my works there is almost always a human being present - or rather the shadow of a human being who hides in traces and memories sewn into the fabric of materiality, imbuing whole cities, old house facades and ruins, roads and gardens as atmospheres.

I want to see space in paintings - voids that have a symbolic function and an aesthetic texture, a tension. I paint dense spaces filled with vibrating air masses, with light. But the painting itself is a laconic form of a graphic trace, as if suddenly appearing in the void, floating smoothly in the timelessness. Such a trace is unfolded in a restrained scale, it dissolves the image, immersing it in a meditative environment.

Space in my works is a metaphor for temporality. It creates painting as an immersive environment in which we can immerse ourselves and which offers us an abstract, peaceful view of time. We see the multitude of ideals and truths that inhabit and have inhabited this world. And we see how we intuitively seek to free ourselves from them.