Karolina Árpa · Letters to Venice

Letters to Venice need no words; they require only a keen and delicate gaze. Painting itself doesn’t require words. It is nonverbal, an experience that exists beyond language. Karolina’s letters, too, are nonverbal. Yet beneath their quivering and vividly painterly surfaces, one can discern layer upon layer of meaning. Paintings, like letters, cannot exist without an addressee, without a viewer. 'Painting is a prophecy of itself being looked at' John Berger once said.

Each of Karolina Árpa’s letters is a palimpsest. But unlike traditional palimpsests that lead us backward in time, uncovering ever-deeper layers of the past, Karolina’s letters are messages to the future.A future that is only faintly visible through the swirling mist in her works, a future the artist draws closer through her very existence and her art.

Swirling, branching, embracing, cocooning strokes—what are they? Nets? Seaweed? Raindrops? Airborne particles? The play of waves? An inner self-portrait? A tangled thread, a labyrinth? A search for self and the thread of Ariadne? Chaos or cosmos?

For the artist, Venice itself holds the answer. It is not just a city, nor merely a world; it is a way of being in the world, of perceiving and transforming it. Venice is both the co-author and the addressee of these letters.

The central work of the exhibition is titled Peremoha, which in Ukrainian means victory and it comes from the verb to be able. Karolina Árpa has been able, and her letters of gratitude and love are addressed to Venice and to us, the viewers.