PURA. Traces of Memory

title

2009

year

Lech Twardowski

author

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synopsis

PURA. The Traces of Memory was a site—specific installation filling the entire interior of the WRO Art Center. Modular elements on canvases — paintings and texts in stencil technique — were used to build monumental painting—surfaces in context of which video components were projected. The gallery floor was covered by giantic (200m2) painting on canvas. More ↓↑

Inspiration and the construction element of the exhibition was an objet trouvé — strange memoires handwritten by anonymous author from which the artist choose texts capturing the ephemeral mental states of the mind, deliberations on insanity and nature of the reality. The found object itself — present within the exhibition in form of projection — for the artist became a reason to examine traces of his own memory. These traces, recorded in painting, don’t reveal their meanings, they merely hint at how to search for them.

Pura (Puta, Poteh) is an angel of forgetting and bad remembrance. In I. B. Singer’s short story, Jachid and Jechidah, Pura is an angel who disperses the divine light.

Place and date of recording: WRO Art Center, Wrocław, September/October 2009

video

artist's bio

Lech Twardowski (PL), b. 1952, is a painter and a performer. Creator of environmental painting installations and initiator of happenings and interventions in public spaces. He also employs electronic media. In his practice, he consequently broadens the terrain of painting by testing the possibilities of the medium in search for the truth and energy of the creative gesture and its reception. With his works, he often creates spaces of tension between the solid and ephemeral, between the whole and its single constituing elements.