he oldest art that human beings have made, along with images of the animals they hunted and the females who gave them birth, have been signs and symbols. Found inscribed onto the rocks and stones these human beings lived among, these pictograms are the first -- the most primary -- acts of imaginative awareness that remain recorded. In these simple symbols, psychic energy is contained, directed, released, or transformed. An open equality comes into form between an invisible thought and its expression in visual language. Such open equalities vitalize the art of Katharina Salawa, and give it both meaningfulness and mystery.

In one of her paintings on linen, four pairs of white ovals rest, one set above another, in two vertical columns on the raw fabric. These are signs of being, signals of presence spoken eight times in exactly the same way. They do not act, they interact in a silent, unmediated peace. A work on handmade paper depicts a large circle in black, intersected by four smaller circles set at its cardinal points, in a field of white paint on heavily textured paper. The painting is declarative of a major symbolic form being met by four repetitions of itself -- a hierarchy of resonant shapes that may say as much about primal nurturing as about the replication of identity. In another paper piece, a penciled cross's upper, left and right arms terminate at the paper's edge in white rectangles, while the lower arm touches the upper edge of a warm green horizontality. As a complex symbol of existential grounding or as a psychologically pleasing reconciliation of a cruciform, this piece is as fulfilling as it is open to an infinity of interpretations. Katharina Salawa is an Austrian, born in Poland, but her surfaces, her colors, and her shapes could be found on a Moroccan wall, in a Greek taverna, or inside a Tibetan cave. It is also an art that emerges from its time and out of its own specific culture. Critic Tatiana Salzirn has remarked that the cultural epicenter of European art has been shifting, since the end of the Cold War, further eastward from western Germany, and it has been a continual surprise that "eastern" European art has been sophisticated enough not to reflect any obvious cultural traumas, but instead often offers an expression of "innocent life, life without preliminary knowing." Katharina Salawa's singularly innocent paintings are each an act of returning to a basic identity. Their visual language is universalized and instantly readable, open equalities not only visually, inside their edges, but also between the purity within Katharina's psyche and that same quiet simplicity within our own. — J.W. Mahoney      J.W. Mahoney is a Washington artist, critic and independent curator who serves as Washington's Corresponding Editor for Art in America.