Opis wystawy
In one of our conversations, Jakub Słomkowski said of his paintings: “To me, they are something like summaries”, and I found this entirely apt. I have the impression that they contain the essence of stories, their nodal points, a condensed inventory of their most significant motifs. These are the cue words we present to you in “Table of Contents”, an index of motifs drawn from the private life of fairy tales and from the symbolic thinking derived from them, which persists within us regardless of age. As the Romanian philosopher and scholar of religion Mircea Eliade wrote: “Symbolic thinking is not a property solely of the child, the poet or the psychopath: it is consubstantial with human existence – it precedes language and discursive reason.” It precedes language, but fortunately it can be – as the works of Jakub Słomkowski demonstrate – captured within the frame of an image. Within the meanders of symbolic thinking, therefore, lies the answer to the question: how does Baba Yaga work within us?