"HEROES 23/26"/ acrylic painting/ not stretched/ high quality canvas/ dimension 140/160 cm. I send only the canvas in a tube. I attach a certificate of authenticity. Kariko ono_Karina Antończak. At present I live and work on the outskirts of the Warsaw. I am a painter, architect, a woman and a mother. “Heroes” deconstructs the traditional portrait, reducing the human figure to a sign of emotional presence. The individual silhouettes function as fragmentary traces of memory — suspended between visibility and disappearance. The rhythmic compositional grid creates a tension between individuality and collectivity. Each form retains its autonomy while simultaneously remaining part of a larger, almost social emotional landscape. The layered application of paint, the rawness of gesture, and the restrained chromatic palette lend the work both an introspective and material quality. “Heroes” exists on the threshold between figurative painting and an abstract investigation of human presence. I do not paint from nature (any subject, be it faces, landscape or abstraction), I create an image from a bank of memories and from there they go on to abstraction. I show a vision of a constructed world with my own words. To me, the relation between colours, lines, their weight, tensions and the forces ruling the composition are important. I was always a painter and I became an architect somewhere along the way! I was an immature, unconscious painter at the High School of Fine Arts; studying architecture and my subsequent career an architect shaped me and my personality. It gave me the courage to live according to my nature. For 15 years, my paintings have been in collections in Europe and the United States. IG karikoono