The title of Jolanta Paterek's series, “A Woman a Man or a Human” is intriguingly enigmatic, suggesting a singular view of our species, an existential ambiguity regarding spiritual and sexual identity. Reportedly, each of her works includes “a modified bathtub, a painting and a black box” in its composition, but these elements are so thoroughly transformed by her unique artistic vision as to be unrecognizable as such in Paterek's exhibition “Symbiotic Texture” at Agora Gallery, 530 West 25th Street , from June 28 through July 1. (Reception June 29, from 6 to 8 PM.)

The scale of Paterek's pieces is heroic, suggesting monumental ambition, and coupled with her aggressive approach to materials, the rugged presence of her pieces can be somewhat startling and overwhelming. Picture some unprecedented combination of the California funkmeister Bruce Connor's charred dolls, strollers, and burned furniture with an insistent humanism akin to Rico Lebrun and Leonard Baskin, and you may get some idea of the territory Paterek traverses and the impact of her work.  
It has been written that the use of the bathtub in Paterek's pieces is related to a process of “purification” and a metaphorical “transformation of the human body and spirit”. However, it would appear that the transformation occurs as much by virtue of how Paterek transcends the materiality of the crude found materials she employs as through the suggestive power of her imagery. For her ability to wring a sense of human suffering and redemption from the twisted, crumpled forms she creates with such materials amounts to a kind of aesthetic alchemy.       
All distinctions between painting and sculpture are done away with in these works, which engage the viewer on a visceral rather than intellectual level, with their darkly delineated surfaces and thrusting configurations that appear to writhe with a repressed energy, as though they are about to leap off the wall. The closest comparison one can make is to the found metal reliefs of the distinguished French sculptor Cesar, as well as to the crushed automobile pieces of the American artist John Chamberlain. Paterek, however, is after something more than a formal effect. The great paradox of her work is her ability to make the type of forms that others have employed to purely abstract effect evoke a sense of emotional empathy in the viewer. Thus her preoccupation with purification is twofold, applying not only to the symbolism of her imagery but to the manner in which her pieces endeavor to “cleanse” the vision of her audience as well.
Granted, Paterek's bathers are in no way related to the graceful female nudes that Bonnard depicted languishing in sunny domestic interiors. Rather, with their bloated torsos and extenuated, emaciated limbs, Paterek's personages appear so thoroughly used by life as to be rubbed smooth of sexual identity, and their ritual baths could as well be taken in vats of acid as tubs of water. Yet, for all this, Jolanta Paterek's mixed media works, wherein subtle, fiery tones glow out of overall blackness of her compositions like embers in ashes, speak of the enduring strength of the human spirit, rising Phoenix-like from the ruins of earthly agonies.                         

­­Wilson Wong