In the empty space of a plastic foil tent  a naked male body is smooth and clean, after a short while it gets suddenly covered with dark ink. The streams of black flow and splatter and drip over the skin, creating a random, graphic pattern. Szymon Gdowicz's newest performance project references the action painting tradition in a unique context of an intimate relationship between the model and the artist, in which the body replaces the traditional canvas. 

 

The process of creation resembles both a caress and an act of sublime violence. The lines and patches of ink darkening the paler skin become an unexpected, organic ornament, entwining the whole body in a web of accidental contour lines. The patterns bring to mind a failed attempt at calligraphy, a study of a wilting vine or a splatter of recently coagulated blood. The damp ink covering the smooth skin is likely making it shiver, dark streams dripping over the body tickle and irritate, leaving a graphic mark of disturbing touch. The rapid track of lines and stains accidentally scattered on the skin's surface is then fixed, to become a tattoo. The artist breaks away from the traditional for tattoo copying of the existing or newly created designs, usually transferred to the surface of the body and only then fixed using ink, for spontaneously created images left on the body by paint poured over it. The tattoo becomes as unique as the body it adorns. 

 

Gdowicz's experience draws from the primal, ritual significance of tattoos. The model's body, covered with black ink is symbolically anointed by the artist, and then is a subject to a painful initiation, after which the body will always carry its physical memory. The marks left by the paint dripping down a naked body, fixed onto the man's skin, will keep changing, gradually vanishing together with the body, and the man himself.

 

Dagny Dobrowolska