These beautiful, passionate outpourings of grief

on the death of his two-year-old daughter are

a perfect expression of that Polish intensity of feeling

which surfaces in Ewa Gargulinska's dark, brooding

paintings. Her consistent colour range of deep blue,

red, purple, offset by occassional outbursts of acid

yellow, explores a world of melencholy and sorrow,

the 'haunts of pain' of the poet's mourning.

 

But the active surface of the paintings nevertheless

bespeaks the living rather than the dead.

The compassionate presence of the guardian spirit

wards off 'the eternal iron slumbers' of despair, by the

power of art 'to purge our human thought of all it's

dread', 'where angels dwell beyond distress and fear.'

      

Dorothy Walker

Irish Independant