The Hollow Men: A Polish Viewpoint
Dominika Pyłczewska
People have an endless tension to be a part of the group. It doesn’t matter which kind of group. They desperately desire to be in the community, to be appreciated, to be understood, to be loved, to be desired as well. To mean something. To be right. Even if it’s a well-known principle.
Sometimes a person loses it’s own individual attributes, because being a member of the group costs something. This loss of individuality forces us to look for the links between us and other members of our community. The present ones and those which were here before us. We need to have a sense of the continuation in order to consciously take our own steps forward. It is hard to think about the new without knowing anything about the past.
On the one hand people have a natural desire to be part of the group and on the other hand artists, as individual human beings, have a tendency to highlight this condition. Even an artist wants to be a part of his community while wanting to distinguish from it at the same time.
Ana Rita Canhão’s works of art reveals the above mentioned tensions. By creating her art, she is somehow taking a voice in a discussion on the human nature in general. She shows that being a part of a community is not necessarily a natural thing for a human and that individuality is the price for a membership.
Artists seem to have a special power of seeing the world in many midtones. Nothing is really clear in this world and they know that. Especially when creating a piece of art they unconsciously approach other artists. The Hollow Men - Untitled #5 has been created and presented in Poland. It’s hard to believe but we can easily find the trace of Polish female art works in her creations. We can find the past in Ana Rita Canhão's next step.
Ana Rita by purpose reduces the human being to the faces - the most important human body part for the European civilization. As Humanity we are losing particular faces by multiplication and unification of them.
We can find a similar approach in Alina Szapocznikow's works as well as in Magdalena Abakanowicz monument Unrecognised located in Poznań (Poland). Both of the Polish artists used multiplicated human bodies to show the crowd. They use it for different purposes, but still we are able to see the dialogue between them.
Firstly we can see that even if we talk about the dark side of human nature, we talk about that in the aesthetic point of view.