Aniela RYMKIEWICZ
Beaux-Arts de Paris
The exhibition theme intrigues me with the idea of venturing off a path and, willingly or not, ending up on another. Through my paintings, I try to portray landscapes of strangeness, my memories of different places, and the folkloric creatures that inhabit them. Often, this process involves questioning my relationship with my birth country, Poland, and the disconnection I feel now, having lived in France for a long time. For the exhibition, I’m working on a project centered around history and its transmission from one generation to another, emphasizing its importance and weight.
Milk bars, or bary mleczne in Polish, are establishments that began during the USSR occupation of Poland after the Second World War. As the name suggests, they primarily served milk-based meals. The idea behind milk bars was to make food cheap and accessible. My four canvases tell the story of three teenagers who discover an abandoned milk bar that appears mostly in ruins. As they explore, they find the basement is still intact. In it, a strange serpent guards the history and stories that were never told to the teenagers. The serpent tells them they can have all the books and letters, but they must pay a price: they will have to forever carry the serpent’s mark.