Polyptych 7

Colour is the most important thing in Aleksandra Jachtoma's painting. The artist, trying to find the colour appropriate to an emotion, applies many layers of paint onto an ultimately textureless canvas which, only after appropriate working, as she herself says, „takes in air” and can be regarded as a work of art. Otherwise it is merely paint squeezed from a tube and a support, not the perfect colour to whose study she has devoted nearly 60 years of creative work. In a documentary film she recalls: „Painting is a constant struggle with paint, to transform it into colour”. These explorations involve many layers of thin, almost glaze-like successive colours, in their surprising juxtapositions - where she often tries to reconcile her two favourite colours: blue and red. „I think that art is not to be understood, it is to be absorbed,” she recalls in the film. That is why two further factors are exceptionally important in Aleksandra Jachtoma's painting - order and luminosity. Free of chaos - of energetic brushstrokes - the painter's canvases balance between Colourism and geometric abstraction, quietly asking for a moment of contemplation and an attempt to experience what an aesthetic experience is.