Angelika J. Trojnarski

Texts

'After the Gold Rush'

by Kinsey/DesForges Gallery
Los Angeles
September 2009

Variegated decay and abandonment are the protagonists
of Trojnarski’s work - dissolving dwellings and orphaned
amusement parks, rusted ship hulls and the rickety edifices
of a civilization desperately denying its own condition and
fate. Focusing on the architectural remains and industrial
excess of an economic fall-out, Trojnarski examines how
humanity’s true strengths can be dwarfed by the greed and
myopia of a dominant few, leaving those affected clinging to
their residual past and wondering what went wrong.

In this investigation, Trojnarski creates a certain
Baudelairean beauty; fractured planes propel outward,

sustained by unfaltering scaffolds and solid foundations, all
brilliantly illuminated under awash of radiant light. A heroic
optimism motivates the apparent wreckage, demonstrating the
vast potentiality for change and regrowth. She explains, “This
exhibition is a dichotomy of attraction and rejection, temptation and
redemption.“ These “seductive still lifes of destruction,“ caught in
arrested motion like a neglected construction site, hauntingly bear
witness to the traumas within our collective memory. Like skeletons
of their former selves, the images seem to lament an irrevocable
loss while implicitly calling for an effort to move forward and rebuild
the twisted spine of social conscience.

'White Elephant'

by Prof. Dr. Guido Reuter
Academy of Arts Düsseldorf
Professor of Medieval through Modern History of Art
January 2009

The picture White Elephant shows a ship, whose hull and
other superstructures, crowned with a flag, protrude
skeleton-like in the artwork's facture. The wreckage is
supported by vertical and diagonal piles whose unsys-
tematic and almost chaotic arrangement demonstrates a
pathetic stability. The entire formation of the stranded ship -
including the useless supporting piles on land - testifies to
the inevitable process of decay and decline.

What does the title White Elephant mean in terms of what
is visible in the painting, as nothing is apparently remini-
scent of an elephant, especially a white one?
To this day in Thailand white elephants are held to
be sacred animals, are symbols of power, not to be used for
work, and need a lot of care. Thus they are a considerable
financial burden to their owners. In the past, white
elephants were even presented to the king’s enemies as
gifts, so they would suffer heavy financial losses, or even
total ruin.
This is what the expression “white elephant” refers to in the
English language. It describes a valuable possession that is
useless, makes more work than it’s worth, and is simply a
burden. The idiom “white elephant” also exists with
reference to development policy. In this context “white
elephants” are objects, which are expensive, cause social
and ecological damage, and bring few benefits
(e.g. controversial building projects like dams).

Like White Elephant, all the other paintings by Angelika J.
Trojnarski engage with human failure in a symbolic way
through stranded, broken, useless, decaying objects.
Despite technical protheses, decline and decay cannot be
stopped.
Progress to one person may be lethal danger to another.
The art historian Thomas W. Kuhn very rightfully pointed
out that Angelika J. Trojnarski's paintings refer to the

tradition of the memento mori (reminder of one’s own
mortality) and the vanitas theme (the transitory nature of
life).

Why does the viewer not immediately turn away from the
destroyed - terrible and sometimes even ugly - objects?
What is it that, on the contrary, produces a maelstrom, and
compels the viewer to look repeatedly and intensely at
these paintings?

For me, it is the special something that the French
eighteenth-century philosopher, art historian, and writer
Denis Diderot described - for the first time in art history -
about Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin's painting The Ray:
It is the “peinture”, the special painting technique,
the skill of Chardin, which in an inexplicable, even magical
way transforms the ugly, ghastly ray into a thing of beauty
and worthy of contemplation. Chardin’s “peinture” spins this
object into the painting's coherence so that the viewer
does not shy away from it in disgust, but stares at it in
fascination.

Angelika J. Trojnarski's paintings also possess this quality
in their own individual way. Her masterly art of painting, the
manifold handling of the paint's materiality, the tones and
moods of the colours generated, bring forth a structured
colour tone weaving her motifs into a fascinating oneness:
this is what holds back the viewer from fleeing, and
relentlessly drives the gaze back to the motifs.

The paintings' surfaces lay open their processual creation,
exhibiting “tears” and “wounds” arising from the powerful
painting technique and a variety of interventions in the
paint's materiality. Here the artist develops the pictorial
character of her subjects - a vital factor in why the pain-
tings are such self-contained, consummate works of art.

'Shadows and Fog',
by Peter Frank
Author for L.A. Weekly
January 2008

'The young Polish artist A. J. Trojnarski infuses her paintings with a hefty dollop of middle-European angst and alienation
without falling victim to myriad cliches. Her palette may be dank and dreary, but it glows like fog with a diffuse light and
establishes a compellingly indistinct space in which figures and structures struggle to define themselves. Everything in
Trojnarski's pictures has an almostness to it, with parts of machines and parts even of people fading from opacity and
seeming volume to an almost gossamer transparency.
The things occupying Trojnarski's cityscapes and interiors - and, indeed, the cityscapes and interiors themselves - hover in
and out of existence, as if in a dream or a recollection. As Trojnarski reminds us, sight and memory are both grossly faulty
modes of perception, but they're all we have with which to hold the world.'

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