La Jornada: Sarah Kuźmicz exhibits oil paintings and drawings that explore identity and memory in Casul

Over the years, Sarah Kuźmicz collected hundreds of drawings. They emerged while testing materials, studying other painters, or simply warming up my hand before starting to paint.

“Since I was a child I drew a lot. I never showed those works; they were doodles, essays,” she recalled in an interview with The Day. As the years went by, those figures stopped being simple notes. “I realized that I couldn’t keep them with other things; they wanted to go out and have the autonomy that my canvases have.”

From that revelation was born Before the world was made, we had a face. Composed of 26 pieces, 15 oil paintings on paper and 11 charcoal drawings, the exhibition explores identity, memory and that which remains beyond appearance. It is exhibited at the University Book House (Casul).

The title comes from Before the World Was Made, poem by WB Yeats that Kuźmicz translated into Spanish. He had read it years before and ended up finding in those verses a way to name the search he developed in his painting.

“I was fascinated by the ambiguity of this poem. In the translations it seems that a woman is speaking and the message is much simplified. The English version is much more ambiguous, much more metaphysical. It is not about superficial issues of appearance, but of the soul, of how we see ourselves and how they see us.”

The portraits start from that same search. The factions emerge between veils and blank areas, suspended between presence and disappearance.

Unlike previous projects, where the figure coexisted with broader compositions, in this series the artist focuses attention on the faces. The characters seem to emerge towards the viewer without losing their ambiguity, as if they were about to fade away.

“I like these claustrophobic, Chekhovian, overwhelming spaces. Those faces almost burst onto the paper; many times there is not even space, as if they wanted to occupy everything.”

The washes and the white of the support keep the image open. For Kuźmicz (Krakow, Poland), a piece is never completely resolved. “Finished does not mean finished. You finish when you have already said something, just what you wanted to say. The artist’s intentions are there, but then there is more. Thanks to those gaps, the viewer can interpret meanings that go beyond what we wanted to say.”

Drawing accompanies a good part of his work. Sometimes it works as an exercise to warm up your hand, test materials, or record an idea before it disappears; other times it opens paths that lead to painting. Paper also allowed him to continue this practice outside the studio when moving large-format canvases was difficult.

Evoking an idea from Paul Valéry, Kuźmicz explained that copying a work does not mean reproducing it, but rather learning to look from the place of the person who made it. “When you’re working on it with a pencil, you get involved, you start to see things that you didn’t see in a different way.”

This exercise allows him to find solutions that he incorporates into his painting. Sometimes the opposite even happens: during a trip he draws on paper and, when he returns to the studio, those images open up new possibilities for his canvases.

His work is also fueled by visual memory. Kuźmicz mentioned Titian, Velázquez, El Greco, Goya, Cézanne and Balthus, as well as writers such as WB Yeats, Juan Rulfo and José Emilio Pacheco. More than isolated references, he is interested in those works where composition, color and rhythm produce meaning.

“For the painter, visual memory is very important. We store images all the time and, when we paint, all of that ends up mixing with the imagination.

“For me, form is fundamental in art. All these aesthetic questions are inseparable from the intellectual and the conceptual, and the form has to be a carrier of meanings. It is what I am looking for.”

Before the world was made… It will remain open until September 26 at Casul (Orizaba 24, Roma Norte neighborhood). It can be visited from Monday to Friday from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., and on Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Free admission.