Conditioning

How much of who you are was decided before you could choose?

In Search

(inspired by the film The Intouchables*)*

I experience.

Why do I cry when the light from the screen
becomes my glow?

I absorb the rough light,

I search for my own god
in the cracks of everyday life.

I return the gaze.

How good it feels, at last,to simply be.

Barbara Puto, 2018

Where do others end and you begin?

Conditioning / Uwarunkowania
2026

Oil on canvas
120 × 80 cm
From The Construction of Freedom

Conditioning

Conditioning expands the question introduced in Personality. We are shaped not only by the people we encounter, but also by the world into which we are born.

Culture, family, language, history, faith, nature, art, education, social expectations, and legal norms enter our lives long before we are able to decide whether we accept them. Some become sources of strength, sensitivity, and belonging. Others may become limitations. Most are neither simply good nor bad — they become part of the structure through which we understand ourselves and the world.

This is why the figure is not isolated from her surroundings. Elements of the external world enter her space and become intertwined with the body. The boundary between what comes from within and what has been absorbed from outside becomes increasingly difficult to define.

For me, nature and art are particularly important here. They do not merely surround us. They can alter our sensitivity, our imagination, and the way we experience reality. A film can make us cry. A landscape can remain within us for decades. A belief inherited in childhood can become either a source of meaning or something we later need to question.

Conditioning is not about rejecting these influences. Without them, there would be no self to liberate.

The painting asks a more difficult question:

How much of who you are was decided before you could choose?

I begin with a nude figure. I want to show the human being before the surrounding world begins to define her.

01. The beginning

A surrounding space begins to emerge. It is not a specific place, but the environment in which a person grows and learns how to read the world.

02. The Environment

Nature enters the painting as one of the first sources of sensitivity. It does not merely surround us — it stays within us.

03. Nature

More images and signs enter the figure’s space. Art, culture, history, and the surrounding world begin to shape how she experiences reality. Their colors also start to enter the body, suggesting that external influences do not remain outside us — they become part of our own construction.

04. Culture, Art and Color

At this stage, I decided to lower the figure’s arm so that her hand could touch the flower. The gesture became important to me: she is not only shaped by what surrounds her — she also reaches toward it. Some influences are inherited or imposed; others we actively choose and make our own.

05. The Gesture

Not every influence is imposed on us. Over time, we also turn toward some of them ourselves — choosing what we want to keep as part of who we are.

06. Choice