Eyes Without a Face by Aleksandra Sidor

Lately, painting feels like a return to something I don’t remember forgetting. I say I’ll stop, but I never do. Each time, it’s the same: I sit in front of the surface, and something slips. A mark appears. I don’t know if it’s mine. I don’t know if I’m thinking or being thought. I only know that once I begin, the distinction between vision and memory, gesture and glitch, flesh and symbol starts to dissolve. Painting now lives in a state of exposure - prehistoric in instinct, volatile in form. It comes from the body, but moves through systems we barely perceive. Brushstrokes become code. Images become symptoms. They are not illustrations - they are readings. We used to open animals to ask what was coming. We burned shoulder blades, studied the cracks. Now we open datasets, scroll anomalies, trace trends, scrape fragments of signal from behind our screens. The questions haven’t changed: What am I seeing? What is coming toward us? Divination is not a superstition. It is a way of noticing what logic cannot explain. A sensitivity to flickers. A trust in irregularities. Knowledge doesn’t always begin with facts. It begins with a hunch. A stain. A twitch. A shape that feels familiar before we know why. Even science began here. Kekulé’s ring, Poincaré’s flash, Turing’s unprovable intuition - all of them felt something before they proved anything. The method came later. The vision came first. Sometimes, I think painting isn’t about seeing - it’s about surviving contact with what we cannot yet describe. If hyperstition is the fiction that makes itself real, then painting might be one of its oldest visual forms. Science fiction has long moved comfortably within these ideas. Stanisław Lem called it cognitive futurology - a way of thinking into the future by simulating its mental weather. His futures were soft, strange, internal. Long before virtual reality or AI intimacy, Lem foresaw the psychological consequences of machine logic: fractured perception, artificial affect, and the erosion of self-recognition. In Solaris, the alien doesn’t attack. It remembers you. In The Futurological Congress, reality isn’t destroyed - it dissolves. These are not threats to the body, but to the mind’s ability to locate itself. It is in this space - of seeing without certainty, of searching without a face - that these paintings unfold.

 

The exhibition’s title, Eyes Without a Face, echoes both a cult film and a spectral pop elegy, each marked by disembodied vision and unstable identity. More recently, the phrase has mutated again, this time within TikTok’s looping, algorithmic landscape - giving it a renewed and distinctly digital afterlife. These works do not offer a map or a face to read. While Baudrillard theorized simulation as the disappearance of the real, I sense something else: not absence, but the echo of presence, distorted. I don’t believe meaning disappears. It becomes something else - mutated, unstable, harder to name, but still felt. Meaning doesn’t resolve - it proliferates. Not in clarity, but in encounter, something like knowledge begins to emerge.

 

- Aleksandra Sidor
Tomaszów Lubelski, 3 December 2025