Artist Profile: Marta Poznanski - LONDON KICKS - Fashion, Music, Art, Film, London and Going Out

Though artists should never have to explain their work, there should be no stigma attached to one who finds value in doing so. While Marta Poznanski’s work carries enough verve and her command of the medium of painting is assured enough that she needn’t feel it necessary to elaborate on anything beyond the silent canvasses she offers the viewer, she has an enviable facility with words with which to compound her ideas. The best examples of her visual work possess a dark grandeur, capable of illuminating the struggle of life in the face of death and more obliquely the study of good in the face of evil. Her deft use of textured black backgrounds creates silent landscapes into which she scrapes her subjects into existence. There is an admirable literariness to her work; it is as if she were not at all concerned with the narrative of life, but the moment at which daily struggle reaches an epiphany and in creating that moment alone is able to imply whole complex inner lives for her imagined subjects. On another level, however, she is an artist whose practice has roots in critical theory and her ongoing project ‘Panopticum’, seeks to republish the degree dissertations of the most exciting young critics at their untrammelled creative peak, before they become jaded by the commercial or academic worlds. Her enthusiasm for this project is infectious and I can’t wait for her to publish her first manifesto, promised imminently.

Charles DD Smith