I have always dreamt of having a group of friends, of artists who could become my spiritual and emotional community, indeed my family. As far back as I can remember, I have always enjoyed socialising, mediating, and recommending acquaintances, also animating and promoting all the friendly people I have come across. I have always supported others, in which I may have gone out of my way at times, but I have taken an interest in people whom I have helped to recover from numerous trials and tribulations. I did this by accompanying, listening, sharing joy, and solving common problems with the important aim of saving people. At the end of the day, it turned out they have also saved me…

At a later stage of my thinking about the creative family of artists, an ephemeral if important project crystallised, a vision which was planted in my brain in 2012, while I was waiting at a tram stop with my friend Alternative Tiger, in Winogrady, Poznań. It was then that I first spoke with conviction and defined the name and slogan for my artistic vision. It was this keyword:  “Lagunart”… And that became a reality!!! Step by step, from one point to another I built up the gallery and the Lagunart&ducky Artists Group with my imagination. Slowly and consistently, commensurate to my strength and capacities… This is how I successfully completed my next, experimental and risky “art course”, crossing the elementary threshold of dreams. Right now, 12 years down the road, there is a 2-metre billboard with my artistic advertisement www.lagunart.pl at the same bus stop.

So, from the word go I would invite those who were kind to me, friends, and artists to team up with our informal group with the offer of mutual support, help and care and the promotion of art. I gained both hope and allies. And as the initiator, I also needed warm contact, because I craved for human understanding and acceptance… In a word, a lot of passionate feelings and thoughts brought us together, but the process of taming and regaining a sense of mutual connection and trust was neither obvious nor easy. Months of working and experimenting together would pass and we acquired more and more faith and power in the artistic strength and expression of the creative message.

Thanks to the pictorial imagination in painting, graphics, and words, we extract, uncover, and extrapolate important artistic and meaningful messages from our sensitive spiritual space. We use these meanings to develop a personal and peculiarly individual language of art. We act constantly, vibrating in our pre-metaphorical spaces and mutual relations, personal references, which also greatly engages and creatively incinerates us…

We also know that we will probably come to be disappointed by ourselves, by life and events, and by our personal opinions or creative withdrawals and experiences. An encounter with another person in our group is invariably a question. We do not know what we will encounter in the other person. We do know, however, that although no one is alone, everyone is in fact deep down lonely.

We can’t assume that we have it all under control because indeed we are also somewhat tangled up in fate… However, we consciously choose this slight deficiency that accompanies us constantly during the day-to-day creation and exploration of time, along with the achievement of fullness and incompleteness of expression and of creation. All the time we experience, witness, try to catch up with our limits, expectations, and aspirations.

So I always wait, as a self-generated and random animator, for a right and given time, which will be the most appropriate in contact with the chosen person and with myself… Sometimes I wait longer, because I know that there are also our lashes and wounds from the present or the past, which resurface like uninvited visions and spill out on us with all the immensity of bitterness, regret, and fear. But there is also often a natural joy in the encounter!

I am now honoured to present our art by: Agnieszka Balewska – [Pale Hawk], Beata Pendowska – [Moonlight Panda], Rozalia Nowak – [Angel’s Eye], Piotr Pawlak – [Flaming Seagull], Grażyna Kielińska – [Alabaster Mist], Janina Bezler – [Chopin’s Gladiola], Hanna Krugiełka – [Hot She-Wolf], Andrzej Maciejewski – [Photo Creator], Julia Zabrocka – [Modal Shell], Bogumiła Janicka – [Seed of Confidence], and by artists: Monika – [Silent Cat], Jola [Accidental Word], Kasia [Sunny Ladybug*], as we are a unique group of friends and at the same time a creative team of intuitive creators, focused on the theme of emotional and primal art in real and physical matter.

THANKS TO YOU/US ALL!!!

[Poznań, Lagunart&ducky, 2024]

Agnieszka Balewska [Dr Agi Bali]

Who Is Agnieszka Balewska [Dr Agi Bali]?

When I first met Agnieszka Balewska, we were both twenty-odd-years old students at different universities in Poznań. In comparison, she stood out thanks to her huge enthusiasm and honest and unbridled commitment to art. She exuded a rare energy. She graduated cum laude from the State Higher School of Fine Arts (now University of the Arts), earned her Ph.D. from the AMU Institute of Cultural Studies, and later received the Medal of Young Art from Głos Wielkopolski daily. She was virtually everywhere, exhibiting paintings and holding performances… She was unstoppable. However, life would put her youthful plans to the test and showed Agnieszka its less friendly side. She suffered and hardly anyone can bravely endure such suffering, let alone be ready to act, to stay optimistic, and to help others.

Agnieszka, who has for years been known under the pseudonym Dr Agi Bali, is one of the bravest and most upbeat people I know. I am amazed by her concern for others, which matches her humorous distance towards herself. Her sense of gratitude has no bounds and only her humility in the face of life might be greater than it. Agi is a spiritual person, a fact that is reflected in her paintings, texts, and her warm indulgence towards others. She is an artist, a publicist, a leader, an animator, and an art therapist. Every week, she meets with people as part of the Hope Duty Days she initiated at the Pod Lipami Culture Centre. She exhibits the work of friends and acquaintances in the gallery she runs with determination in the basement of the block of flats at 8 c/100 Pod Lipami.

She can manage and handle things that are impossible to manage, as her enthusiasm and humour are contagious. There is also room for a slightly melancholic reverie in her cheerful, stoic view of the world, exemplified by Agneszka’s words regarding the activities of her group and herself: “Thus we are saved and guided by Divine Illumination, and also by our earlier personal choices. Because deep down in our art we want to be and are forever young, and also, simultaneously, eternally too mature and old…”

Bogna Błażewicz