THE CONSTRUCTION OF FREEDOM
A painting project byBarbara Puto

We are shaped by that surrounds us.
Freedom begins when we decide what is allowed to remain.

What makes us who we are?

PROJECT STATEMENT

The Construction of Freedom

A human being is a construction that is never complete — much like the central figures in my paintings.

We are shaped throughout our lives. The people we meet, relationships, upbringing, culture, experiences, love, loss, and trauma gradually become part of our inner structure. Each of us emerges from a different configuration of influences and memories. I am interested in the paradox at the heart of this process: if what comes from outside co-creates the self, where does autonomy begin?

In my paintings, the body is never a closed or stable form. I build it through layers of oil paint, moving from transparent glazes to tactile impasto. Figures overlap, contours dissolve, and the material of the body merges with its surroundings. Personality becomes a structure in a continuous state of formation.

What creates us can also begin to restrict us. Patterns of thought, stereotypes, prejudices, fears, habits, addictions, and expectations may become structures whose presence we gradually cease to notice. In some works, they take the form of a web or fractured shell that surrounds the body, penetrates it, deforms it, and eventually breaks apart, leaving traces behind.

Colour, light, and the scale of the canvas are integral to this transformation. As the figure regains agency, it acquires more space, light, and physical presence.

We cannot completely separate ourselves from what has shaped us. We cannot erase our history, relationships, or experiences, because they have become part of the construction of the self. We can, however, recognise them, question them, and consciously decide which traces we still want to carry with us.

Are we, then, free?

Perhaps freedom does not lie in escaping what has shaped us, but in seeing our own construction clearly enough to reclaim the right to continue shaping ourselves.

In this sense, freedom is not a state we simply attain. It is another construction — one built consciously from what we choose to preserve, reject, transform, and carry forward.

The construction of freedom begins when we cease to be merely the result of influences and begin to consciously participate in the continuing creation of ourselves.

CZYTAJ WIĘCEJ ⟶

Artist Bio

Barbara Puto is a Polish painter based in Warsaw. Trained originally as an electrical engineer and later working for many years in management, she developed her artistic practice outside the traditional academic path. This background continues to influence the way she thinks about structure, systems, relationships and transformation.

She works in oil, acrylic and watercolour, combining figurative painting with layered, fragmentary forms. Human figures in her work are rarely complete or autonomous. They overlap with other bodies, dissolve into their surroundings and are altered by structures that penetrate or surround them.

Her recent practice focuses on the construction of personality: how relationships, upbringing, culture, memory, fear, prejudice, habits and experience become embedded in the self, and how these same forces can later restrict autonomy. Through changes in colour, light, scale and materiality, she explores the possibility of recognising these influences and consciously reshaping one’s relationship to them.

Puto has presented her work in solo and curated exhibitions in Poland and has taken part in international juried competitions and publications. Her current oil project, The Construction of Freedom, develops these questions through a sequence of five paintings tracing the movement from formation and conditioning to constraint, release and regained agency.

CZYTAJ WIĘCEJ ⟶