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The “Twilight” project leads us into the world of sensual and mysterious fairy tales. This is a story about passion, with Neverland in the background. Neverland is a time-free land that tempts us with the promise of immortality. It becomes a captivating curse for those who succumb to it. For as time goes on, the lines blur and all nature, Peter Pan and Captain Hook, Wendy and the boys, pirates and Indians, tumble into One.
How, then, are the fairy tales as a visual category connected in the individual pictures inspired by J. M. Barrie’s book “Peter and Wendy”?
The works evoke primal sensuality and the effect of the existence of the world, in which humans blend with nature and Neverland, becoming their integral part. They are sensual and carnal, and at the same time spiritual, dreamlike, and hyper-realistic . The festival of life and passing is going on, and the surroundings are massing, greening, washing, creating an amazing backdrop for the heroes who exist in it. The feathers glow black, the matted grass – like sea waves – pulls the figures into its depth. Humans integrate with nature, sometimes so strongly that they practice a kind of mimicry. The colors of the individual frames can be as saturated as the mystery they carry. Somewhere in the distance, there is a horizon of (in)mortality that seduces you like a drug.
The project is not meant to illustrate scenes from Neverland, but to follow the fairy-tale qualities omnipresent in the book, with the use of images. It does not tell a story, but illustrates it, calling before our eyes a strictly visual narrative, so dense in iconic terms that it definitely transcends the world described by Barrie. We will not find an obvious division into good and evil here, but – as Roger Caillois pointed out – the enchanted world of fairy tales is harmonious and knows no contradictions … once one adopts the specific assumptions of this supernatural world, everything in it will remain remarkably stable and homogeneous. The paradox, however, lies in the fact that the ambivalence of balancing between life and death, wakefulness and sleep, joy full of exultation and excruciating pain is stable and homogeneous within “Twilight”. All the time in Neverland, to which the project takes us, we are touched by a pitch-black feather tied to a fingerless hand.
(Adapted from a text by the exhibition’s curator, Marta Smolińska)