Childhood gardens V Painting

Let me tell you about my latest exhibition "The Choidchood gardens". The people who saw my exhibition stressed these paintings were not only a very well-composed canvas, full of subtle colours, profesionally painted and of good workshop, but also this was the story full of contexts. Fot me, this cycle of paintings means the challenge whoch I plased for myself. Creating these canvas was the return to the childchood time and the years of growing-up. They are a memory of colours, scens, emotions, places, events and people, who in particullar fell in the memory of a litle girl and which have returned in the works of an adult woman. They are the tale collected on the black and white photos from an old family album. They bring back to memory the time when I was a litle girl and in the first week of the september every year my grandmather used to take me to the best photo atelier in the city. These photos captured my growing-up. Today, looking at them brings back to life the colours of a turqoise dress, of yellow brows and of red wernished shoes. These colours come to existence in the colourfulness of the painting cycle. One of the contexts of the exhibition is that it is universal becouse each of us can find oneself in it. Each of us must have one's old album and memories captured in it. Each of us experienced moments in life which were particullary important. We all met friendly and hostile people who saped us and our life story. For that reason this cycle of paintings - "The childchood gardens" can be very special for you, becouse it forces us to bring back to life the most secret memories ant emotions. These canvas are associated indifferent ways. I, myself, am constantly discovering new perceptions at the paintings. The most similar understanding of the theme is the one presented by Carlos Saura in the move "Feed the ravens". “I have thought for a long time that I have wings” “Childhood Gardens,” a series of paintings by Magdalena Nałęcz, is an exceptional collection. In the middle of her life, the artist is painting pictures in which she returns to the days of her childhood. Is it an attempt at recapitulation of her life or rather an unusual and nostalgic journey back into the past, a retrospection and reminiscence of the most important places and emotions connected with them? Or perhaps breaking a spell of sadness brought by memories which are not very cheerful? Magda’s journey into the land of childhood does not lead inside the happy walls of her family home. Quite the opposite – the house is omitted. Memories concern, above all, the gardens enchanted with reminiscence, some elusive moment remembered by the colour of a dress, the shape of a ribbon knot, the tying of booties. The garden space is safe: it is a shelter which allows dreaming. It is a hiding place in which a person grows up, becomes mature and comes out into the world. It is a place filled with profound experiences, failures and sorrows, but they are immersed in colour which will give comfort to the artist for her entire life. However, do not let us be deceived by apparent calmness of a well-kept garden. No idyllic image of childhood is there to be found. No birdsong can be heard – birds are unattainable and their voices are confined in a cage guarded by a beautiful but sad little girl. She looks like a doll or like a prop carefully chosen for the remembered picture, for the memory of a school badge on her arm and clean white knee-socks. She is waiting, motionless. She is dreaming. She feels the wings of blue butterflies, which she is going to spread much later, while painting another gardens. Intense colours throw very distinct light on little girl’s sadness. She is alone. She seeks for the strength and warmth of the wolf, a guardian of her safe garden. Only the memory of an excursion to the lake recalls a blithe moment of playing with her mother… Only then the heroine becomes again a laughing child. The enchanted garden of Magda’s childhood is far from Frances Burnett’s secret garden where children perform their own rituals to help their friend recover. Yet both gardens seem to have one thing in common: the magic power to heal the soul. The power of wings that may carry us high if we make a little effort. Magda opened a garden which had been closed for years. I hope she will find roses there, and remember that she has wings to fly. And we, while wandering around her childhood gardens, become engrossed in reading our own memories, warding off sorrows and searching for our lost wings. For, as Wisława Szymborska has said: “Everyone of us has their own childhood. We can safely say that it never ends, and it even comes back to us when we think it is irretrievably lost. This depends partly on ourselves how we are going to remember it.” So let us wander around Magda’s gardens, feeling the wings of her butterflies on our backs; feeling the warmth and strength of good wolves who will always protect us. Magdalena Kąkolewska