Artists

Monika Chlebek

Press release

"Hot With Junes" is a title borrowed from Bolesław Leśmian's poem "Ballada bezludna" ("The Deserted Ballad"). In the work of the Warsaw poet, the natural world exists solely for itself, developing at its own rhythm, indifferent to human presence. In Monika Chlebek's work, however, the human being is an intrinsic part of nature and its processes, dissolved among raspberries, flowers, and summer heat—here we catch sight of a mouth, there a hand… traces of presence. Raspberries, flowers, spiders, and humans coexist within a single space, immersed in the same red atmosphere of summer, molded from the very same erotic matter. Chlebek paints nature, yet she does not depict typical landscapes; she shows neither garden nor forest. Instead, she strips the viewer of distance, drawing us deep between the leaves. Her raspberries fill almost the entire canvas, a spider swells to the size of a deeply unsettling creature, and flowers shed their botanical identity to resemble fragments of flesh. We are not looking from the outside; we are entangled in the flowers, pulled into the very center of the raspberry thicket. The Kraków-based painter seems to follow a trail blazed by Wolfgang Tillmans, who attempts in his photography to capture the sheer intensity of a direct experience with nature. He is not concerned with grand narratives, but with intimate moments, small instances of wonder: a ray of light, a patch of skin, a drop of water, a flower petal. Monika Chlebek shares a similar sensibility: for her, sensuality is conjured through proximity, and emotional resonance is a sensation of the immediate moment. Perhaps transience itself is the key to this exhibition. The paintings attempt to salvage something that is about to vanish: a scorching June, ripe fruit, summer light, and moments of intense life. The paradox of transience lies in the fact that the most vivid moments prove to be the most fragile. A succulent raspberry balances on the edge of decay, and the hottest day of summer already carries the whisper of autumn. This moment, suspended just before the solstice, is the space where eroticism unfolds. We recognize these observations from the work of Georges Bataille: eroticism is the experience of life's excess. It is the moment when existence oversteps its own boundaries, becoming too intense, too full, too abundant. The exhibition "Hot with Junes" operates within a similar tension. Red here is less of a color and more of a temperature, an atmosphere—the state of a world at its point of maximum blossom. And this blossoming is far from innocent: hidden among the leaves, we spy small culprits—a spider, a shadow lurking in the dense foliage, lips intertwined… a premonition of hidden thorns. The artist herself notes that whatever might prove uncomfortable remains unseen. The viewer is offered fruit while sensing that thorns may be hiding in the bushes, ready to scratch their hands. They see flowers, yet anticipate the process of wilting. They taste the fullness of ripe raspberries, yet divine their spoilage. Ultimately, Monika Chlebek's painting is subtle, but it is not innocent. We can smell the overripe fruit, the heated leaves, and the summer humidity—the very embodiment of summer's sensuality. Our bodies remember these sensations, even if we are reluctant to admit them aloud. Every one of us has been in that thicket, and every one of us blushes. Chlebek tells a story of us, and of a world poised precisely between fulfillment and disappearance.