In the case of Joanna Przybyla‘s latest creations, the sequential procedure leading to the nascence of a work of art has a rondo form. It corresponds to a single-note cadence. At first, there is silence, emptiness and growing gesture-releasing tension. The sharp dissection of a plane has the ring of an isolated sound. Line makes its appearance, born of interference with non-existence. The gesture and its effect reveal the field of interference. In the same way, a sound is a recollection of silence.
An isolated sound makes music.
A single line is a drawing.
An isolated sound is audible only in silence.
A single line is visible only on a blank surface.
Sonority is the matter of sound.
Light is the constructive matter of drawing. Light gives substance to the planend defines the shape of the line just like instrument gives sonority to sounds.
Each of these elements has a peculiar field of action but nothing is strictly isolated, demarcated, and categorical. Nor is there a point of departure and destination. Once a sound has ceased, silence follows that may swell with another sound. Darkness will extinguish a drawing, and new light will give it another shape.
Arvo Pärt offers an area singled out from the cacophony of the world of sounds. Joanna Przybyla listens intensely to the tone-colour and proposes the luxury of contact with the music of light played on one note.
Both may only be experienced far from hubbub.
Anda Rottenberg
(from the catalogue published on the occasion of the exhibition Sunlight Drawings for Arvo Pärt, Galeria Foksal, Warsaw, 2006)