The inverse of Horaces ‘ut pictura poesis’, here we have painting like poetry, the poetry of W B Yeats or Ezra Pound, for instance. Indeed, one might say that Ewa Gargulinksa has brought the poetry back into painting.
Poetry is a free association of idea and images within a loose, but not altogether disconnected, framework. Gargulinskas framework is classical mythology, the sculpture representing it, and modern psychology. These two are not entirely alien to each other, as Freud has shown. Of particular interest is the fact that the images emerge out of the paint, as it were, and rarely reach anything like naturalism.
This is truly painting poetry, the most fascinating aspect of which is the emerging mirror-image.
Cyril Barret,
Head of Philosophy
Campion Hall, Oxford
March 1999