ARTTYCO TALKS
Marta invites us into fields of explosive stillness—where paint behaves like a living force, and each gesture becomes a record of energy, transformation, and raw sensation.
ARTTYCO TALKS | July 13, 2025
EPISODE #3: MARTA KUCSORA
1. Your Liminal Spaces show immerses viewers in monumental, breathing canvases—like storms paused mid-motion. How do you approach creating such expansive, enveloping works that feel alive in space?
M: My goal is always to make the canvas feel like it’s not just an image, but a living organism suspended in motion. I approach large-scale works as environments rather than objects. When I paint, I think spatially—I move around the canvas, physically engaging with it from all sides. The scale forces me to relinquish the idea of “composition” in the traditional sense and instead allow the painting to evolve as a kind of atmospheric field. Layers breathe through each other. Time is embedded. The work becomes a residue of movement, chemistry, and accumulation. It’s alive because it was made in real time, through real forces.
2. You describe your process as a “physical practice” akin to choreography: pouring paint, manipulating the canvas, then filming in Beautiful Error. How do movement and performance shape both the painting and its meaning?
M: My body is a tool in the process. The way I tilt, push, pour, and move around the canvas—it all becomes a type of dance. This isn’t performance for the viewer, but for the painting itself. In Beautiful Error, filming that process revealed just how performative it already was. What seems accidental—paint colliding, reacting, pooling—is actually the result of hundreds of micro-decisions made in movement. There’s something poetic about surrendering part of the authorship to physics and material behavior. That surrender, that error, is beautiful because it mirrors the way life emerges—unplanned but deeply structured.
3. Your technique balances meticulous planning with embracing chemical reactions, gravity, and chance. How do you structure that tension between control and wild unpredictability in each painting?
M: That tension is essential to the vitality of the work. I begin with a plan—a palette, a general flow, sometimes a series of gestures I want to test—but the materials have their own agency. I work with industrial pigments, gels, and resins that behave differently depending on humidity, angle, or drying time. The process becomes a collaboration with material entropy. I create conditions for something to happen, and then I intervene. It’s a push and pull between will and release. That dynamic tension is what makes the painting vibrate—it resists being fixed, even when it’s dry.
4. Scale is fundamental to your work—you’ve said it’s necessary to transcend the everyday and travel from micro to macro worlds. How does working at monumental size change the way viewers—and you—experience the painting?
M: Large scale demands embodiment. It pulls the viewer in not just visually, but physically. You can’t grasp the whole painting at once; you have to navigate it. I’m interested in that sense of being dwarfed, of being inside something rather than looking at it. For me as the artist, scale allows freedom—my gestures can be full-body, my tools unconventional. But more than that, scale becomes a metaphor for transition—for crossing thresholds between microscopic forms and cosmic events. It allows viewers to lose orientation, to experience painting as immersion rather than image.
5. Your paintings seem to capture both the tiny structures of life—like cells or particles—and vast natural forces, like storms or cosmic flows. What draws you to that contrast in scale, and how do you translate it into paint?
M: I see no boundary between micro and macro. What’s happening inside a cell can feel visually identical to a satellite image of a hurricane. I’m fascinated by that visual symmetry—how scale collapses when we abstract form. In painting, I translate that by layering different visual languages: fine detail against vast gesture, translucency against density, rhythm against stillness. The materials—especially when they react—mimic natural systems. Pigment blooms like bacterial growth or evaporates into vaporous forms. For me, painting is a way to study the universality of structure—to create a visual field where scale is no longer a hierarchy, but a continuum.
