There is practically no limit to the information that can be accessed online. Nearly everything that exists in the real world makes its way to the Internet within a fraction of a second. In the era of Photoshop, anything at all can have its ulterior image; what is ugly can be beautiful, what is small can be bigger, what is out-of-focus can be sharpened.
Herein the principles of originality are undermined. What Małgorzata Szymankiewicz finds striking is the fact that everything we look at online has been edited or manipulated to some extent. The departure from the archetype has essentially become the norm and few of us dispute the fact.
And, so, the status of the painter's canvas is uncertain in the context of the split between original, archetypal works and their facsimiles. To what extent is the painting created on the basis of a thousand others an original or merely a copy? Szymankiewicz is a true child of her generation, one who easily finds her place within the post-auteur reality of contemporary art. Her paintings, constructed in the traditional manner, out of canvas, frame and paint, are created at the very intersection of the material world and the virtual one.
Hundreds of thousands of images on the computer screen are processed by the artist much like a paper shredder consumes ream after ream. The effect of this process is an amorphous clump of colorful snippets that come together in arbitrary arrangements. In observing this visual fallout, Szymankiewicz acts much like a Dadaist in using these snippets to create randomly composed poems. Out of a whole mass of accidental compositions, she chooses the select few that will serve as the subject of her painting. The theme of color blocks, one of the most frequently adopted styles among abstract artists (Daniel Buren, Bridget Riley), makes its reappearance in a newly-conceived guise.

"It's no longer about the question of whether something has faded out, whether it's old or new, but it's rather about a game of opposites, the associations that come up between them. (...) When it comes to abstraction, it is, after all, a way of understanding, of visualizing, simplifying, symbolizing content or ideas. It doesn't exist for its own sake, nor is it a way of conceptualizing. The approach to abstraction has changed, its goals are different. I'm referring to the difference between purely abstract thought and the standard objectives of abstract painting as a style that is focused in most part on form. What I'm interested in is the dualist approach or, rather, an understanding of abstraction, leading a dialog between these two perspectives, facing them off against one another. Abstraction isn't a goal in and of itself, but, rather, a tool; in this sense it can be said that it has become more representative, expressive, bereft of autonomy. It can be used to represent many different things. Abstraction does not need to be simply auto-referential. Perhaps the primary mistake was to think of abstraction as the opposite of representation, as if it had no capability for initiating discourse. For me, abstraction is very real, physical, but, at the same time, it refers to something beyond its formal aspects. At the most basic level, it has its own internal logic, but it also has an external logic - when we capture it in its broader context."
Małgorzata Szymankiewicz interviewed by Marcin Krasny, "Mere Formality", Labirynt Gallery, Lublin 2015