Cartographer’s Trademark

This idea resonates with the way Karolina Szwed constructs her paintings. She rarely works from a fixed image, preferring to rely on what memory has retained, simplified, or displaced. Routes glimpsed from a plane, plans, crossings, silhouettes, or sewing patterns return without attempting to recover their original form exactly. In Cadastral Fabric, an almost entirely invented network of roads mingles with the fragmentary memory of a shirt pattern. Observed, remembered, and invented elements thus coexist within the same image.

This displacement concerns gesture as much as motif. Szwed is interested in handwriting, note-taking, and stenography for what they reveal about the relationship between intention and form. Before it is even read, a sign already carries a speed, a pressure, a hesitation. A few marks can condense information; a minute variation is enough to alter its reading. Repetition offers no guarantee of recovering the first formulation: the gesture is performed again, but never returns unchanged.

This impossibility of exact repetition directly informs her painting process. Szwed paints, erases, covers over, and begins again. Some surfaces become paintings, notebooks, and workspaces at once: notes, tasks, or motifs appear and are then erased once they are no longer useful. Yet oil imposes its own memory. An inscription left too long, a line pressed too firmly, or an earlier layer may refuse to disappear completely. The painting is built as much from what was intended as from what resists erasure.

A form can thus emerge at the very moment the artist is trying to remove another; what belonged to an earlier version can suddenly redirect the next. In Trap Street, a canvas begun as an interpretation of a pedestrian crossing passes through several studios and numerous reworkings. Beneath successive layers, fragments of the original street re-emerge until they form a new image. The detour becomes the method.