Hommage à Danil Lider - a specific painting environment - is a special work in Maria Stangret Kantor's output. It summarizes almost the entire artistic production of that artist resulting from her experiences that penetrated the issues of relations between the image and the reality of nature. At the same time it is a work in which her fascinations with painting and theatre are fully focused. As the most "theatre" work in her painting, it belongs to the cycle of homages she created in the eighties in memory of the celebrities from the world of art, literature and history such as Sergei Esenin, Anna Frank, Kremlin physicians murdered in 1953, and Tadeusz Kantor. Easel paintings with landscape motives and sheets from a notebook have been often composed with the elements of rolled sheets, tree trunks and leaves. Contrary to those painting-sculptural compositions, Hommage à Danil Lider is annexing almost the whole space "given" to the artist. We enter the hall, wading through the fallen withered leaves that are littering on the floor, and passing the mutilated tree trunks, slapped with paint, which are protruding from them. Enlarged yellowed and partially burnt shreds of the notebook with Danil Lider's recordings are catching our eyes on the front wall. On the opposite wall the painter has put a few large sheets with stage designs made by Lider. On one of the remaining walls a giant roll is hanging with an unrolling empty sheet from the school notebook, the lower rim of which is partly burnt. It corresponds with the partially burnt shreds of the huge unwritten notebook. Seemingly we are moving among motives that are known from Maria Stangret's creation, but here they enter different relations and acquire new meanings.
The origins of this work are connected with the artist's travel to the capital of Ukraine in 2004. During her stay in Kiev, where lasted her monographic exhibition at the National Museum of Ukraine, she got the opportunity to learn about the fate and activity of Danil Lider, a great Ukrainian stage designer, who died in 2002. For Lider, who was the author of the idea of "active stage design", the empty stage meant a homogeneous, consistent and autonomous unity. It was the model of the universe, a creation of nature, the laws of which we should definitely respect. Lider understood the role of stage designer in theatre as an independent originator, for whom the space of the stage is an area of artistic activity irrespective of director's ideas and actor's demands. The stage design in a stage performance should be not only the background, a decoration, but it should function as a commentary and author's articulation, being a proposed solution to the problem that he got out from the context of the dramatic material. Each element, object or stage prop has its own meaning and plays an important part in the stage design. In 1974 Lider was ordered to make the visual setting for the propaganda play entitled Welcome Pripet, which was performed in Kiev on the occasion of constructing the nuclear power plant in the village of Pripet on the river Pripet near Chernobyl. That typical soviet piece of propaganda was a hymn of prise in honour of the modern taming-nature Soviet man. The play was written to order of the Soviet authorities aiming at breaking the reluctance of the residents of the nearby villages and the city of Kiev, situated only 100 km farther, towards placing the nuclear reactor in one of the most beautiful natural enclaves in Ukraine. In his design, Lider showed the block of the power plant in the background, placing a little poor cottage and a tree in the foreground. As the giant atomic structure was greater and greater in each act of the play, there were less and less leaves in the tree near the cottage. Two years before Chernobyl calamity, the stage designer painted the only picture in his life, in which he presented the explosion flash of the reactor.
Not Lider's prophetic visions, but rather the similarity of motives used by them both in their completely different own arts appeared to be inspiring for Maria Stangret Kantor. In her Homage the artist is dialoguing with the Ukrainian stage designer. She has built her work, treating the hall of the gallery as the model of the world. However it is not a transcendent universe, but the world of her individual memory. She fills it with images woven with her personal experiences, memories and fascinations. In result, she gives to the wholeness a syncretic form of expression, in which the combination of the elements of her art with contents referring to Lider's activity and output isn't limited only to the person, to which the work is dedicated. In the work we can hear the echoes of her earlier homages. Somewhere in the background are resounding the words from Esenin's poem, "And we will be afire, we will swoosh like the trees in an orchard". Arranging the space of her memory, Maria Stangret recalls the load of emotions that lie dormant in wrecks of leaves and trees, and in shreds of notes, just like Kantor did in his Theatre Cricot 2 (she had been its star for a few decades). By the way, Lider had never met Kantor and even hadn't an opportunity to see his performances. However he stored - like a relic in his studio - the copy of a theatre magazine which included some fragments of texts by Kantor translated into Russian.
Hommage à Danil Lider doesn't manifest only a range of moods from admiration and longing up to the feelings of passing by and sorrow, but it concerns also - and may be even first of all - some classical for Maria Stangret Kantor's painting problems of the relation between the image and the reality. In her works from the seventies the artist postulated, "The esthetical and expressive values of a picture should be reduced to their empty models. In effect, the empty image of reality (...) reflects it, leaving it in a pure and undisturbed state (...), almost as a notion in a dictionary, in our mind and imagination, reintroducing it in reminiscence and memory". However her homages from the eighties show the revaluation of this attitude. No doubt it was influenced by the very commemorative themes of her shows, which referred to the past image of reality, which could not be defined in a categorical way in the presence, since it doesn't exist in an unambiguous shape. The empty reflection was replaced by the confrontation of various images of reality recalled from memory. The conflict between the image and the reality of nature was set between the real object (a tree trunk, the leaves) and the recording of its image on canvas, expressed both in pictorial and verbal level (a landscape, fragments of a poem), blurring the line between reality and imagination.
In her works the artist has always paid tribute to figures that had got lost into the machine of history, the victims of totalitarian ideas, the people who had to live and create in the reality of Nazi and communist systems. Esenin, Kantor, and Lider had shut themselves in their poetry, art, and stage design, creating literature, painting and theatre that were completely different from their surrounding reality. The space of life had united with the space of art, giving the image completely different from the universally used at the time. Anna Frank or a Kremlin physician Jakov Rapapport wanted only to survive, but in the case of Anna Frank it appeared to be a too high dream. Maria Stangret was fascinated with how little lacked that nobody would know about that Jewish girl living in hiding in Amsterdam and then murdered in Auschwitz in the last year of the war, as well as how much her innocent records, saved in her miraculously saved diary, introduced to the image of the times of occupation.
In Maria Stangret's work dedicated to Lider, a real segment of reality has been placed in the space of the gallery. However, it is not that segment, but rather those torn and burnt shreds of mean notes spreading on the walls that give the true evidence of the image of the times in which he had to live. It is as if the painter repeated Paul Celan's words, "There is no reality, no given reality; the reality should be found and won." Today we see the history of the twentieth century with the eyes of those few personalities and not with the eyes of those leaders that had been taking the salute from the crowds participating in Nazi parades or communist May Day marches. In his work and life Lider was terribly lonely, stigmatized and isolated, just like other protagonists of her homages.
No doubt Maria Stangret Kantor's work is articulating empathy, but at the same time it is a very individual confession that speaks about the passing by and about the desire of undertaking another attempt to write down the sheets of paper that would be torn and burnt by the time that passes by.
Lech Stangret