Polish-Swedish artist and printmaker Jolanta Johnsson builds kaleidoscopic collage and monotype compositions from figures in crowds, pairs and solitude, exploring the diversity, fragility and persistent beauty of human community.
Zygmunt Bauman, the Polish sociologist, described the current moment as a crisis of democracy, a collapse of trust. His words sit at the beginning of Jolanta Johnsson’s Kaleido Scope within Crowds as both provocation and context. “Real dialogue isn’t about talking to people who believe the same things as you,” he wrote, and it is that observation, about difference as the condition of genuine encounter, that runs through the entire cycle of works.
The series gathers figures into four sub-series: crowds collected in unspecified spaces forming kaleidoscopic compositions; single people in limited spaces; and people in pairs, in relationship. The formal logic of each arrangement says something about how community forms and fractures. Crowds dissolve the individual into pattern. Single figures press against their edges. Pairs hold the particular tension of proximity. Together they build, as Johnsson intends, a large surface that illustrates the richness of human community through the shapes it takes.
The technique is as considered as the concept. Each 50 by 50 centimetre work is made in collage and monotype on a paper board assembled from pieces of Fabriano graphic paper. That basic convex structure is not incidental: it affects how the monotype reflects light, introducing a subtle material dimension to compositions that are already built around layering, difference and accumulation. The physical surface carries its own argument about how things come together and how they catch the light differently depending on where you stand.
Johnsson, who trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw and holds a PhD from the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow, has spent her practice moving between two persistent themes: landscape and the human figure. The current series belongs to one of her figurative periods, shaped by the particular pressures of the present moment and by a long-held conviction about humanity itself. People, in her work, are always both: capable of damage, and beautiful in their diversity and complexity.
Jolanta Johnsson is an artist and printmaker based in Sweden, originally from Poland. She teaches printmaking and graphic design at Vistula University in Warsaw.
ARTIST LINKS
jolantajohnsson.eu
@jolantajohnsson
malexanderartgallery.com
Kaleido Scope within Crowds. Collage and monotype on paper board assembled from Fabriano graphic paper, 50 x 50cm each.
