Artist: Aneta Kajzer

With her third solo show at Semiose gallery, Aneta Kajzer maintains a cycle where each exhibition appears to emerge from the previous one as a natural mutation of her universe. Heavy Water, staged in 2021 represented the first installment, with its dense, fluid paintings rippling with currents and internal eddies. Two years later, Head in the Clouds ascended towards lighter skies and featured suspended forms and faces floating amidst the color. In Too Close to the Sun this trajectory is set ablaze, pursuing a radiant apotheosis, appearing as an almost mythical ascent. After water and air, fire takes their place: In the same way as Icarus, the painting ascends to a point of almost dazzling luminosity, fully conscious of the risk of losing its form, yet also aware of the exhilarating freedom that accompanies this proximity to the sun. What was once flowing and evaporating, condenses in radiant heat: the matter reaches its fusion point where light becomes color and color becomes energy.

Aneta Kajzer’s sun is not an astral body: It is a flood of paint, a furnace that dilates and dissolves forms, bathing them in burning color as if, when brought close to their flash-point, these colors might gain an extra degree of freedom. In some cases, this chromatic stridency attains an almost electric intensity: the acidic pinks, the lemon yellows and fluorescent greens generating their own light and the energy-saturated surfaces becoming sun screens. These areas of over-exposure provoke dissonance, summoning a collision of contrasts that quiver to the point of irreconcilability and stretch harmony to the brink of rupture. In these almost overly-luminous instances, it is as if Aneta Kajzer were exploring a territory where painting is accomplished at the risk of being scorched in order to achieve more clarity. Too Close to the Sun lays bare that precise instant when painting takes the form of a kind of unstable meteorology, a critical point beyond which wind-swept brushstrokes, downpours of pigments, flashes of red-orange oxidation, misty pastels and cool, shadowy layers are unable to hold their place in the atmosphere and are condemned to an inexorable fall. Nothing is planned in advance: forms emerge in the painterly flow, guided by interactions between materials, by the fragile balance between the painter’s gestures and the withdrawal of her brush. Aneta Kajzer’s painting is comprised of vigilance and attention, a practice that lies in wait for its own revelations. Her figures never appear due to premeditated decisions, but as slowly formed apparitions, born of the climate of each work. They emerge from the colors as if from a nebulous haze, a stroke of controlled luck, a run interrupted at just the right moment, a smear that suddenly acquires meaning in a melancholic flurry, or on the contrary, in a slightly insolent or humorous pirouette. The various figures can be sensed before being fully recognized, like a face glimpsed in a cloud or reflected in water; discovered rather than invented. In the same way as when a cloud-watcher perceives a head, a profile or an animal, the artist hunts down fleeting resemblances and lets pareidolia reveal the scene: a brush-stroke, a swollen drop or a metallic scratch etched with the edge of the paint-tube might all contribute to the sketching out of the outline of a face, then, in the instant that follows, vanish into the abstraction of an evanescent figure. In the painting Doppelgänger, the mass of ultramarine blue transforms into hair, a child’s, smiley-like face is overshadowed by a second, almost menacing figure, composed of a broad purple stroke curving through the space of the canvas and whose eye / dot reveals a divided being: two faces, two approaches (drawing / painting) coexisting like two simultaneous moods. In Harvest, a small, faintly smiling orange landscape-cum-face, covered in spots, is bathed in a midnight-blue breeze; the pastoral green opens up into a liquid hillside. The pareidolia is frank and intentional, nature takes on a form which itself then resolves back into nature, in an analogy with certain nuagiste paintings by Jean Messagier.

The sheer pleasure taken in painting is evident through its almost ecstatic intensity and in the interplay of differing textures and viscosities—diluted or velvety oils, more turbulent watercolors—in the streaks that become hair or wind. Each gesture starts out as a tactile or chemical event before taking form as a contour sustained by its lightness and capacity to signify and then withdraw—to create a figure and almost immediately return to pure matter. The painting Slippery Slope is one of the most explicit examples of this shift, with its flowing orchid pinks, its suspended deep blue, the pale yellows that seem to evaporate from the surface and a violet inflection that barely hints at a profile. The painting does not simply advance toward the viewer, it cascades downwards, its adherence shifting through an accumulation of frictions. What might appear can also rapidly retract, catch its breath and move on. This feathery lightness does not exclude storms: in Aus dem Paradies Vertrieben (Expelled from Paradise), the deep purple mixed with rusty brown announces the oncoming turbulence; blood reds and mauves knot together to form tunnels; violets contort into organic passageways; a pink bulb opens out, undecided whether it’s an inner sun or a puffed-out cheek; the representation itself pulses and retracts as if the motif had been expelled from itself by its own inner currents. Aneta Kajzer’s more recent works find their focus in a rusty oxidized palette reminiscent of corroded metal that has been left exposed too long, as well as contrasting bright pastels (acid yellow, milky blue and powder pink): When they get too close to the sun, the colors intensify and become almost caramelized, finally clarifying into a mist of light. Venturing too close, taking the risk of being incinerated, is the natural fate of paintings where accidents are a veritable aspect of the painter’s methodology, where the unexpected is a given, where the works are born at their inception, without preparatory sketching, through reversals, erasures and fresh beginnings. In places the colors detach themselves from any tonal nuance to reach a state of pure intensity that surpasses stridency or any scorched effect to attain an absolute clarity of a tone that asserts itself alone: Pure pink, true blue or yellow verging on the immaterial. These flat tints, with their almost naïve clarity open up clearings in the density of the canvas; they function as optical breathing spaces, areas where the tumult of the painting seems to be suspended, in order for it to view its own existence.

The works of Aneta Kajzer are characterized by successive states of saturation / clarification, heaviness / delicacy, appearance / disappearance and moreover combine figuration and abstraction, maintained in a state of tension so that neither one prevails over the other. This co-existence is not a compromise but rather a standpoint, a means of inhabiting painting while it still thinks for itself. For the artist, the distinction between abstraction and figuration is irrelevant, stemming from an outdated notion of division, inherited from an era when it was still considered that painting had to choose between the real world and itself. She situates herself in the aftermath of this period, in an epoch where form and flow, silhouettes and smudges belong in the same continuum. In Aneta Kajzer’s practice, the visible and the sensory intermingle, color gives rise to form in the same manner that sound gives rise to resonance and her painting is thus a realm of a constant flow between what is revealed and what has melted away. Aneta Kajzer’s painting borrows as much from the liberty of Helen Frankenthaler’s washes and fields of color as it does from the figurative work of Maria Lassnig, Miriam Cahn and Nicole Eisenman, who are all true heroines to her. It’s not a question of abstraction succeeding figuration or vice versa: it is their shared vitality that gives birth to the painting. A flowing brushstroke becomes a lock of hair; a brown drip melts into a curtain of rain: two black dots open up into eyes; spilled cadmium takes the form of a mouth; the swipe of a metal paint-tube carves out the line that was missing in a pencil-less drawing. This economy is allied to a luxuriance that barely blossoms before fading away. Aneta Kajzer’s characters all have their moods—solemnity, a faint smile, tenderness—yet they accept that they are only hypothetical, and are beings that exist simply by chance. But isn’t that ultimately a characteristic of our own common destinies? Icarus is never far away, a symbol of fragile flight towards light that always ends up by being consumed.

Finally, it’s certainly noteworthy that quite a number of the works’ titles refer to songs, whose melodies and lyrics one cannot help remembering when viewing the paintings: Auf Wanderschaft (Felix Mendelssohn, 1845), Space Oddity (David Bowie, 1969), Stairway to Heaven (Led Zeppelin, 1971), Harvest (Neil Young, 1972), All Over the Place (The Bangles, 1984), Slippery Slope (The Dø, 2011), Beam Me Up (Midnight Magic, 2012), Cringe (Awkward Marina, 2024), as well as They Lost Control which evokes She’s Lost Control by Joy Division (1979). Each of these paintings has its own tempo, from a soaring astral ballad to clashing electric guitar riffs, from deep melancholia to the exuberance of disco. Within this mix, the painting shifts from mellow reverberation (the pastel backgrounds), through distortion (the oxidized reds), into silence (the empty white spaces) to a break (the line made by the edge of the paint-tube). Music is not a secondary theme; it is a way of affirming that painting should be listened to as much as looked at, and that its rhythms—runs, strokes and reprises—in reality constitute decisions concerning the oeuvre’s form.

Auf Wanderschaft [On a Journey], perhaps the most melancholic painting in this recent body of work, proceeds in layers of burnt apricot and ash greys. Aneta Kajzer seems to have translated into painting the fleeting moment evoked in the verses set to music by Felix Mendelssohn­—that of a departure, of looking back over one’s shoulder, of the hand waving in the distance: “As I wandered forth to far off lands; just one last time I looked back, filled with emotion, and saw how she moved her mouth and waved to me with her hand.” The painting opens into a vast gradient of oranges and pinks, a warm and vibrant space revealing at its center a pale figure, a haunted face fading into the pale light. The vertical swathe of pink acts like a current of emotion, a voice fading away, whereas the fine green curve, painted in a rapid stroke, is flung across the space like a final outburst. Echoing Felix Mendelssohn, Aneta Kajzer transforms separation into a form of emotional resonance: a farewell that continues to reverberate through her use of color, a voice that lingers in the light.

In Stairway to Heaven, russet arabesques streaked with amber runs, stream down like rain falling from a pale-yellow sky haloed by purplish, celestial marbling. Almost imperceptible arcs and motifs outline mouths, eyes and brows: faces passing through in meteor-like apparitions. The violet edges form a counterpoint as the painting stages its own gravity, descending towards an earthy, organic base on which the rest of the composition sits or from which it rises. The reddish brown is of sensual nature, dense with dark veins congealed like coagulated blood or burnt resin. The colors oscillate between shadows and glowing embers, in stark contrast with the brightness of the upper section of the painting—lavenders, milky yellows and pinkish flesh tones—all coming together in a counterbalancing earthy density. The tension between the upper and lower parts of the canvas, the luminosity and opacity, echoes the movement in the title, suggesting a stumbling climb. This “Stairway to Heaven” represent an ascent towards the light that implies first breaking free from the viscous, earthy world below.

Space Oddity condenses paint into a primordial cosmic broth, revealing its peculiar object from outer space against a vague, colored background. The liquid pigments range from violet and fuchsia to a creamy yellow; tiny halos and filaments proliferate and the paper skin absorbs the color until it becomes almost transparent. As in David Bowie’s song, everything seems suspended between weightlessness and a fear of heights, between floating and disintegration: “And I’m floating in a most peculiar way, and the stars look very different today.” The painting takes the form of a gravitational field where each hue seeks out its own orbit: the deep purple draws the eye towards a dark core while the soft pinks and yellows take flight towards the edges, as if all the light were seeking to escape this materiality. There is no up or down, nor any stable form of orientation, just zones of density and evanescence, forces of dispersion and absorption. The painting is almost akin to a galactic nebula that retains some vestiges of warmth; spots appear in pairs, boundaries dissolve, and in this floating space an almost metaphysical solitude resonates—perhaps that of Major Tom, David Bowie’s astronaut, surrendering to the beauty of the void, or that of Aneta Kajzer constantly pondering the strange beauty of the pictorial space.

Jean-Charles Vergne