(The text was published in illustrated magazine “Poland”, No. 10(314), 1980, pp. 56-57)

So many descriptions flock to mind which we have to discard when we look at the works of Maria Pinińska-Beresiowa. They all seem too literal, too unequivocal and mutually contradictory.

One thing is certain — that it is art produced by a woman, and that it is erotic art. The artist creates environments, or perhaps situations using ready-made objects (such as pink pillows) and arranged according to a more or less precisely definable concept. Thus objects-signs, objects-symbols. Seemingly ordinary objects of daily use such as a window, a bed, a mattress — yet totally altered, anthropomorphized, eroticized. A child’s bedding becomes Erotic Swaddle when we see it heave and billow erotically and childishly at the same time. There is an outline of lips, as red as in a lipstick ad or white in contrast. The table assumes the shape of a woman’s body, rounded or hollowed. The material seems to come from the boudoir although there are no boudoirs today and although we do not find here such motifs as an excess of flounces, muslins, nor do we find the climate of hidden implications to which we have become accustomed by art since the days of Fragonard. The material, to use a more down to earth expression, is that of bed linen. Full of whites and pinks and textiles used for ticking, for quilts. Everything is clean, neat, hence reticent in ex-pression in some way. New and ironed, hence also like the crisp bed of a teenager who begins to cast knowing looks.

None of the scenes may be said to come from the repertory of erotic art in the strict sense. The artist discovers new and surprising motifs: The Love of the Quilt for the Bed Sheet, Window in Spring. It is actually a theatre of objects which draw close and then draw apart, which stumble over each other, press against each other. At other times they betray a certain excitement, a disquiet by some specific agitated gestures of the quilt, by a pose, as Fight as a butterfly’s, unexpected at the wide open window.

It is not a woman’s room shown in sections, but a fantasy on the subject of a woman’s room, lazy day-dreams that are also irritating. Undefinable moods, subdued voices, whispers flit between the objects which the artist observes with fascination like fetishes.