The summation of ten years’ work, the exhibition Puls-es showcases the works of Professor Ewa Latkowska-Żychska, and highlights the artist’s unique paper-making and Japanese technique. The intricate and detailed quasi-paintings reflect the richness of the material used. Puls-es foregrounds the élan of nature and life. The exhibition is part of a series presenting the works of the artistic community associated with the Academy of Fine Arts in Łódź.

Over the past two decades, Professor Latkowska-Żychska’s creative endeavours with paper have been combined with her teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts in Łódź; while the inspiration to establish the Paper Workshop at the university stemmed from her collaboration with Karen Stahlecker from the United States. The use of this commonly known material as a basis for creativity, such as in drawing or graphics, and as a substrate for creating a new artistic technique, has its genesis in Cubist and Dadaist collages and in the compositions of such artists as Erwin Heerich, Leo Erb, Jiří Kolář; or in Poland, Edward Baran. Professor Latkowska-Żychska would go beyond using paper as a material needed for the execution of composition, incorporating instead the processes of paper creation and construction into her artistic technique, thus imbuing her works with a new dimension. She is an inheritor of the approach that emerged in the 1950s, pioneered by New Yorker Douglass Morse Howell, which saw paper pulp used as a creative tool.

Professor Latkowska-Żychska’s compositions are the result of a specific technological process. As she herself claims: “paper is created by constant movement and it manages to leave a record of this very energy.” This process, defined by changeability and intuitive experience, is reflected in the titles of the works. The titles themselves seem significant, although the artist herself does not set store by such things. Many of the titles refer to the theme of journey and time, their recording and passing. Others denote the light of the sun and moon, and the derivative of this light, which is colour, the beginning of life and corporeality. Some titles can even indicate the presence of landscapes.  The artist also does not hide her indebtedness to the music of Henryk Mikołaj Górecki. Indeed, thanks to their fleshy, three-dimensional structure and ineffable juxtapositions, with their nuances of colours, Professor Latkowska-Żychska’s compositions have kindred ties with the synaesthesia of visual arts and music.

Professor Latkowska-Żychska’s paper compositions are akin to poetry, capturing as they do fleeting experiences and larger processes; and reflecting the artist’s view of the personal microcosm and its replication in the larger macrocosm that we all inhabit. These works, in which every small event sparks and gives rise to more complex phenomena, offer simple reflections on the complicated nature of human existence, with its cyclical nature and individual experiences, as well as its cosmic transformations. These interplays of light and darkness, joy and fear, growth and decay, are arranged in the rhythmic sequence of “pulses”, which in turn create a captivating dance.