Odra, Art Magazine, September, 2019
Painting in an Extended Field
Dr Agnieszka Kłos

Art, but first of all painting, has to resign from an ideal, tragic model and come to terms with their social ineffectiveness. As Ewa Lipska writes in her newest volume "Memory of Operations", we traded in Shakespeare from an early age, and he was telling us that there is no art without violence, without words rape and style terror. Painting has been a trade in Picasso from an early age. Urszula Sliz tries to break with the mafia of looking. Because the mafia according to Lipska is a pattern of looking and not seeing.

Meanwhile, the painting by Urszula Śliz is based on the concept of destroying the classical pattern of looking and seeing, which is played out in the battlefield against tradition. Brought out antique figure - a metaphor of Vitruvius, depicting the ideal, young, healthy, white man - the foundation of the theory of Western architecture, determining the discourse anthropocentric in art, it is undermined and its clear image shifted. With this the man himself as a model, the basis for anthropocentric discourse and forms architecture, acquires feminine features and is enriched with urban elements. a culture that seems to be inseparable from his biology. ​Man - woman - city in painting works Śliz presents the subject as a living body - an organism.​

This concept has been subjected by Sliz to many experiments, especially those that are vital for contemporary attempts at blurring the boundaries between the genre of painting and sculpture, as well as various clues exploring the relationship between physiology, geometry and the city. "Unknown Places
are a continuation of the research. The exhibition consists of a series of abstract paintings and forms made of materials typical of painting, but also of foil, wire, plexiglass and frames, aluminium, photographs and digital prints. They are clearly inscribed in the earlier realizations of Sliz, where she worked in various ways on a de(constructivist) form.​

An chamber  exhibition at the Krupa Gallery makes you think of them as sketches, models and preparations for the new city building. The works illuminate and quote each other. They revolve around the view of a specific section of the city (in some works the visual obsession with the view of the city moat and waves of water returns).​
Spatial forms, accompanying the painting works, are models applied to the flat surfaces of photographs and prints, as well as paints, combinations that imposed the geometric shape of urban modules. Precise, seemingly emotionless and focused documentation of the places that have just been torn off is a system open to the space of the city, but also to the inner space, a system that largely touches the common ecosystem.​
The skeleton of the city dissected by Sliz threatens with a warning tape, which appears at the construction site, but also in the case of accidents and crimes. The place has been dissected, cut out of the tissue city, cursed, attracts curious and special services. Cold in its minimalism, full distance from the viewer, impersonal engineering constructions, show to play the game of appearances. A sophisticated game with the viewer is not about showing, revealing and presenting but, on the contrary, asking questions. Because (un)painting Sliz blurs the boundaries between what's external and what's internal. The painter does not agree to the two-dimensionality of painting, and in the struggle for space, the capacity of abstraction weighs heavily. "My The task," says Śliz, "is not to find answers to questions, but rather to ask them.

"Unknown Place" is a dispute about an old sculptural concept that has been formulated in the 1950s and 1960s as a neo-avant-garde development the experiments of the first avant-garde. According to it, transparency and open air were treated as follows as a positively perceived negative/empty form, which had the ability to generation of active airspace. Both antithetic forms: full and empty, have the same value. Structures Sliz introduce a crack into the system Wölfflin's ​structural analysis, typologizing visual arts into linear (drawing) and painting arts. Working out an autonomous form is a construction of an area where perception and interpretation of art, not only in the category of representation, opens new ways of looking that break down the mafia Ewa Lipska writes about.

British sculptor Phyllidy Barlow recalled how material physicality paradoxically evokes its opposites, very strong and sensual reactions of a spiritual and spiritual nature, and intangible. Spatial works cannot be reduced to a single image, because just like the city has many incarnations. Categories of reality and experience, tangibleness in Sliz's works are juxtaposed with afterimages, phantasms and dreams about the city. We take them apart every day. It's always the same," notes the journalist in Lipsk's poem entitled "Reportage from a Dream". There is fear - there are heroes. There is an enemy - there are songs.  The mediocrity of the city, splitting at the seams, alterations, the cheapness of the materials from which it is made, all take on discipline.​ Śliz balances them with foil that signals order, dimension, culture, and deeper civilization.

And yet the objects condemn their objects to oblivion. Because objects and sculptures can be remembered as a certain image, but they cannot be remembered at all and demand to be experienced. Experience, however, requires real time, necessary to look, go around, think. This is different from a two-dimensional object that presents itself as an image. Śliz fights with the matter of memory, and its most frequent action (in line with the thesis of the British sculptor Michael Dean), is the editorial office of the reality​

The works presenting and interpreting the image are not only connected with the physiological reaction. the viewer, but also his psychological reaction - the warning tape evokes a sense of alienation, disorientation and danger, confronting the viewer with the parameters of space. ...yet too large and too narrow to live. We define the city according to our experience, and the images and embodiments of the city according to two time categories - experienced in the moment of experiencing internal art and physical art that escapes. The third dimension complicating the reading of works is a psychological dimension which, as in the case of the the latest volume of Ewa Lipska's book is called "operative".​

Śliz's works create a strong subjectivity and defend themselves against being eaten by the viewer. It is not is smooth consumption, but the digestion of the leftovers expelled by the city. Protruding rods, sewers, pipes, aluminium foil, plastic, create an incoherent fortification.
Information that is incoherent internally and causes instability of experience, creates a requirement for the recipient to be involved not only intellectually but also intellectually. physical and emotional. As in the postulates of Robert Morris, who demanded art, which enables the experience of holistic forms. American artist Bruce Nauman explains the mode of operation: "One of the ways (...) was to use the voltage between the two types of information that are not entirely compatible with each other - it's not just about the object, which I contemplate and experience; you are dealing with an object related to yet another piece of information."​
"The world is coming to the  end," warns Ewa Lipska. It still sleeps in bushes and alleys cities where the lightning is pretending to be a night-light. Urszula Śliz's works are in the state of of the potential of which Roman Ingarden wrote that the reconstruction of a work of art in its effective properties and update of some of its moments, are conditioned by the ability to "co-creative" viewer. The distant thunder of the collapse that we observe every day touches also the us, the viewers, although Lipska reaches the spell in a poem "Let's hope that it will bypass ours village".​