Celebrity belongs to a research on the screen-mediated image as a contemporary condition of seeing: the moment when looking already becomes producing – filming, replicating, fixing the image for later publication. The real, in the instant of being observed, is already transformation. As David Hockney has observed, painting from life is in fact painting from memory: painting from life does not exist, every image is already transposition. The contemporary mediated condition does not introduce a new alteration; it amplifies an older one – the one that has always inhabited seeing. This research, developed over years through printmaking, drawing, and the artist’s book, has in recent years extended into painting – now focused not on the images we want to forget, but on those we actively desire to keep looking at.
A figure seen in a television frame, on the threshold between feminine and masculine, crowned. The crown, historically an attribute of power – today only directs attention: it has no physical value, it is made of substitutes, it produces a fiction to which the viewer consents. A symbol of distance, but also a gilded cage – the same thing seen from two perspectives. The entire surface is carried by a thin, almost transparent application that hides nothing: a lightness that leaves no room for corrections. Each gesture is one-time, irreversible – perhaps the same desire to hold and to construct that drives the viewer filming with their phone. No impasto: the body of the image is denied, because the mediated figure is stripped of materiality. The orange ground originates from an element of costume – a fur, a shawl – expanded until it invades the entire surface: the object transforms into atmosphere, into light that seems to emanate from the figure itself rather than illuminate it. The creative force of the medium feeds on our own desire: we let ourselves be deceived because we want to be, seduced by images on many levels. Every spectator participates in the process of construction: the moment in which the substitute ceases to be a deception and becomes a pact.
Magdalena Boffito lives and works in Warsaw. She graduated with distinction from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw in 2003, specializing in lithography, and continued her research at the Accademia Albertina in Turin on scholarship. She currently teaches planographic printmaking techniques at the Studio of Lithography at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, where she maintains her studio practice. She is co-author of the artist’s book Bazaar, a text-and-image collage on Warsaw’s Różycki Bazaar (a place now
gradually disappearing). She has exhibited in solo and group shows in Poland and internationally, including: White Box Gallery, Queensland College of Art, Griffith University (Gold Coast, Australia, 2013); Mariusz Kazana Art Collection, Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts ALBA (Beirut, 2013); Malostranská Beseda Gallery (Prague, 2022); Museum of King Jan III’s Palace at Wilanów (Warsaw, 2022); collateral exhibition of the International Print Triennial Kraków (2024); and Malevizi Municipal Gallery (Crete, Greece, 2026). In 2019 she presented the solo show Don’t Talk So Much, curated by Łukasz Rudnicki (Wystawa Gallery, Warsaw). In 2026 she presented the solo show Odorless, curated by Barbara Kazana, at the Galeria u Dyplomatów of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland (Warsaw, April–September 2026). In recent years her research – developed over time through lithography, mokulito, photography, drawing, and the artist’s book around memory, imperfection, and the traces of time – has extended into painting.