Me x 4 2012

Małgorzata Serwatka made this mixed media piece, "Me x 4", and it's like a visual diary page, a space where she's figuring things out through layers of images. It’s not just about what's depicted, but about the act of putting it all together. There are so many surfaces and textures happening here: the smooth flatness of the inset photographs contrast with the roughly rendered portraits. Look at the way the faces at the bottom seem to emerge from a smoky haze, like memories half-formed. Then there’s the collage elements, like the paint sample strip, adding a layer of the everyday, the practical, into this otherwise dreamlike scene. The mark-making is tentative in places. It's almost as if she's feeling her way through the image, not trying to nail anything down too definitively. There’s something of the raw energy of outsider art here, which makes me think of Forrest Bess, who created his own symbolic language through painting. It's like Serwatka is building a world according to her own rules, and it invites us to step inside and wander around.