Does art REMEBER more than we do?
- Beata Wiśniewska-Kowalewska
- May 10
- 3 min read
STATUS EXISTENTIAE / STATES OF BEING
Haptic painting cycle Atelier BWK 2021–2026
There are moments when, after years, we look back at our own path and suddenly begin to see something more than individual events, decisions, or stages of creation.
We see a certain hidden order.
A quiet thread leading through experiences we didn't understand before.
Looking at this cycle today, I feel as if everything began with one pure act of presence…
and after several years, it came full circle,
returning almost to the same place.
To light.
Between that beginning and end, however, entire spaces of inner journeys took place.
States I wouldn't have been able to name before.
Experiences subtle, sometimes hard to capture in words, yet incredibly real.
And perhaps that is precisely why these paintings came to be.
Not as illustrations of reality, but as traces of certain states of being.
Over the years, I feel more and more strongly that art can reflect truths the mind does not yet understand.
It can guide.
Open.
Help us see spaces we had no idea existed before.
Sometimes a painting appears earlier than the awareness of what we are truly trying to live through.
As if it knew something before we did.
Some states are difficult to describe logically.
Yet they can be felt through color, light, structure, silence, or the very presence of form.
And that is precisely why this cycle has never been just a series of paintings for me.
It is a record of a process.
A subtle evolution of consciousness.
Each painting carries its own rhythm, its own silence, and its own truth.
And the Latin titles were not chosen by chance, in truth, they found me...
Latin has always been a language of focus for me.
A language of philosophy, spirituality, and concepts existing beyond time.
These are words that do not merely describe the image, but open a space of feeling.
ANIMA MUNDI – The Soul of the World.
The primordial consciousness of existence.
The state of unity from which everything emerges.
Silence before form.
Light before the birth of movement.
SILENTIUM – Silence.
Not as emptiness, but as full presence.
The moment of focus in which we begin to hear what is most subtle.
The state of pause between breaths.
AETHER – Ether / the invisible space.
Transmutation and flow.
That which exists between light and matter.
The space of transformation that cannot be touched, but can be felt.
PANTA RHEI – Everything flows.
The philosophy of movement and perpetual change.
Acceptance of the process in which nothing remains the same, yet everything preserves its essence.
The state of harmony with what is changeable.
LUX AETERNA – Eternal Light.
Not the end of the road, but a state of pure presence.
Light without weight.
Silence that no longer needs to prove anything.
Looking at this series today, I see something deeply moving.
The beginning and the end
are astonishingly
alike.
As if the entire journey – with all its transformations, flows, silence, and movement – ultimately leads
back to the source.
But not the same one.
Because the consciousness that returns carries within it the memory of the entire journey.
And perhaps this is precisely what the “States of Being” are for me.
Not a closed story, but a living process of knowing.
A gentle reminder that within every human being exist spaces far vaster than we can name.
And art…
sometimes simply becomes a quiet light that helps us see them.
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