MILANOWSKI / STAROWIEYSKI / WACHOWSKI
The three painters, whose pictures make this exhibition, have the same artistic background. They graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw and also developed their skills there. They connect their future as well with the maternal Faculty of Painting, since they work as lecturers. They are also roughly the same age. All of them were born in the 70s. However, the other aspects of their characteristic show a remarkable individualization of each painter.
Tomasz Milanowski works with a sign of flowers and a symbol of an elephant, as well as organic abstraction, which is tightly connected with them. He connected the childish, the formally infirm, the brief, the schematic, but still very precise imagery with the solemnity of creating the thick paint matter, which is structured by a precise gesture and discipline. Poetics of a strict and strong expression and formal brutality take place in his art. The artist is interested in contemporary theme of aesthetization of a cultural and civilization environment. He also dwells on phenomenon of aestheticism tending increasingly obvious. The role of basic conventional picture signs and symbols in a cultural community and the role of obvious meanings, emotional codes of interpersonal communication and the creation of an inner world of a human being, are present in each of his paintings. Milanowski, in parallel, relies on uncertainty and the deceptiveness of the senses. Thanks to a peculiar inner construction of this painting we can move quickly from pure biologism to meditation concerning the higher-lying realm of culture. The motif of flower collection has fallen into the illusion of pure aestheticism.. Flowers have become so “flowery”. They have grown and have created beauty anew. Organic matter got to a level of individual expressive existentialism as well as the general diagnosis of the present time: cancer of civilization.
Antoni Starowieyski weighs the power points of formal tensions on canvas – which he does regardless of the topic – for figures as well as for interiors or landscapes. He has mastered the language of space, the core of abstraction, its statics and dynamics – as he translates them into the needs of his own painting world. Speaking about his painting, existential anxiety, hesitation and uncertainty come to mind. However, he understands the painter’s statement as absolute withdrawal, declaring that expression should be naught, and declares in opposition to the overtly expressive existentialisms. The painter thus captures the state and, at the same point, makes it immobile in a way of a pulsating, shaky form. The things that are hidden behind the state are essential foreignness, everything withdrawn from everything else – a general non-existence in one’s own skin. His painting is as if absorbed in its self. However, it has the space, the breath, and freedom. Asceticism of the painter’s thought as well as the culture of purification are very clearly represented. He uses clearly defined, even aggressive colour, but it never means aggression – it originates from the requirements of the form. Subtly, it alludes to the transcendental – never giving it direct expression, but making it clear enough to be sensed. He also builds an abstract of a pure aesthetic experience. What is typical of the painting are the conventionality of signs, clear, almost transparent form, and being illuminated by the ontic and hieratic light.
Piotr Wachowski in the early days created large metamorphotic visualizations of unfathomable organisms – zoomorphic-antropomorphic hybrids. He developed his own technology, using fluorescent colours. It was a concrete anthropometry in a scientific and post-mortem stream of the ultraviolet light. Believing in possibilities offered by his own method, he undertook to paint a portrait of Adolf Hitler, whom he often presented accompanied by Catholic saints. Truths, figures, values and meanings were placed into a post-modern conglomerate and placed into an eclectic, expanded narration. Pictures were peopled by characters of various origin, often adapted from mass imagination or the everyday life and put into very peculiar situations. Wachowski is interested in standardization of mass culture, its anti-intellectualism and the existential problem relating to it. Irony, confabulation, history, legend, religion, phantasmagoria and cynicism serve for strengthening of the drama of his painting and making the final expression forceful and emphatic. The artist reflects on human identity in all possible aspects and senses, making perfect use of his painting tools. He shows its state in the multitude of conditions, cultural and historical references, through the absurd of participating in the reality, communication, determinism of life. He tries to look from various points of view at oppression and even at violence, which we have to suffer from everyday. The painter keeps a good distance from the matters expressed, which does not mean relativization of morality. The ‘story” of a picture, strengthened by the “signal” colour, is perfectly balanced by the painter’s work in its pure form.
Magdalena Sołtys