Paintings are not unlike people: they can speak to us and they can enrich our lives. One can love them, communicate with them, learn from them. I’ve found such relationships incredibly worthwhile, and this is the experience that I want to share.
My name is Tamara Poniatowska. I read History of Art at Cambridge, and have spent the past 20 years (almost!) in Paris, researching artworks, interviewing painters, bidding in salerooms, authenticating pictures for auction houses, touching, inspecting, looking at art.
Although this statement is true, it doesn’t ring right. It makes me sound like an intellectual, which I am not. For me, art is not about an abstract idea, not even something I can put into words – it is about texture, colour, conviction, physical, sensual. It’s about sharing experiences.
I bought my first artwork in my mid twenties. Emotionally, I was in a state of bereavement. Physically, I was in junk shop in Paris, hunting for a table for my new flat.
Instead of a suitable table, I saw a painting – showing a figure in a landscape at dusk, no masterpiece, but there was something restful about it. Someone in a different time, in a different place had taken their time over painting it. I could not say why, but it put things into perspective. Looking at the picture evoked in me an almost olfactory memory of the country, smells of pine and grass and night, and warm air cooling, as I realised I’d not left the city in weeks.
My taste evolved, but what remains with me is the connection, the connectedness I felt at that moment. The comfort the painting brought me in the weeks that followed. Something I still feel as vividly today, when I look at art I care about: something that tells me that I am not alone.
Art opens new perspectives. Living with art does, yet more. I now love living with mad primitive compositions in primary colours from Haiti or South America, where one finds childlike innocence alongside a sense of menace. I also love jubilatory show-offiness of European 19th century painting, which often shows depth as much as skilfulness.
I love the smell of antiquities, the expression on 15th century Madonnas’ faces which makes me realise while lifestyles may have changed, humans are still fundamentally the same.
I decided to take on a brick and mortar gallery, because these objects exhibited together will be more than the sum of their parts. Artworks are more than images: just as we are, they are physically present, with stories and battle scars and dreams.
Perhaps your story and that of one of my artworks will merge. Feel free to contact me if there is an object on this site you’d like to know more about, or just leave your details below if you´d like to receive occasional news about events in the Gallery, exhibitions, and new objects for sale. Please also bear in mind that most of the artwork can be viewed in London or in Paris on request.
Connecting people and paintings 