The First Journey - Towards People

Dozens of faces. Passed in the street and brought to a standstill for a while. Faces seen on a train and met at the railway station. Confused, tired and timidly unhappy. Alert. Ordinary and self-confident. Encountered in the bar, involved in a chat. Or silent, bent over a deep vessel. Crumpled like an unsuccessful drawing or smoothed out by a shy smile. A little bit ashamed.

Drawn mainly because they exist. Due to sensitivity to all aspects of life. Following a kind of internal imperative, difficult to define. Because of curiosity or the need for registering facts as well. As nothing will happen again and nothing will ever be as it was.
These are faces preserved by the artist in spontaneous, quick and direct portraits. To get a portrait and not a painting one has to work quickly; be apt to grasp the features of a model, to touch their interior while talking to them and in a very short time to create an image which is apparently psychologically true. It can be drawn - in charcoal, under the circumstances which have not been fully recognised yet, and then deliberately using a pastel crayon, not so talkative and detailed. At the beginning with a nervous and impetuous line which then changes into a gentle and melodious one.

Today faces with red eyes and yellow-lilac hair look at us from paper whose shade has been carefully selected. As much unreal as real. Do these portraits use all the knowledge about human beings? Do the drawings express them entirely? Do they reveal what the artist was talking about with the model? Or perhaps they are merely a testimony to the meeting, a document of a moment treated with care and creativity. Like photographs of sketched people who hold their portraits or moving pictures of still drawing sessions recorded on a video tape. To what extent do these records cover at least a minuscule part of that time, of that moment, that short - lasting relationship with a person who, for a while, got into a new dimension?

That is the question about identity, relevance of real existence to its artistic image. Although this question should be raised here, it can be left without any reply. As , in fact, what Andrzej Stefan Wiśniewski is concerned with does not focus on portrait itself, the material effect of creative activity. The very process and everything connected with it are always much richer and more important here. Art at the moment of creation. Unique work in progress.

Constant search during the journey becomes the condition and essence of such an activity, being the necessary background to keep in touch with other people and nature. With ourselves as well.

The Second Journey - Towards Space and Atmosphere

Vast open spaces filled with air. Depth of a landscape up to the remote horizon. Forest cuttings and clearings full of light. An unknown path winding through far-away perspectives. Pantheism of nature.

Nature whose fragment is once easily caught like in a quick reporter's shot, and sometimes it requires frequent meetings in the same place. The artist often returns to this place to discover real and varied faces of Nature - the one lightened up by the sun and that looking at the cloudy sky, the one dressed in a spring attire or covered with a snowy layer.
For quick reporting impressions he chooses an energetic graphic line. Its shade, non-mimetic in its function, intensifies expression of a perceived landscape, often confined to drafts of selected elements. It is supported by free of pastels, natural surfaces of paper; it is particularly useful when the same fragment of nature was depicted in its variety, during different seasons of the year and in varied weather conditions.
In more detailed studies photography seems to be more helpful, which is a staring point for arduous covering the background even by dozens of layers of dry pastel. Then drawings glisten with thousands of reflections of light, they tremble with patches of vivid colourful shades. The artist changes his perspective of observation. From general wide plans he proceeds to effective close-ups, to increase the power of expression. He magnifies the format of his expression to enrich his vision with some additional details. At first the artist tried to make a seemingly 'lifeless' pastel line and a charcoal line look alike to intensify the dramatic effect. Yet then he gradually discovered the creative potential of pastels, expanding the palette and at the same time reaching colour schemes typical of this technique, far from any associations with oil painting technique, and using varied range of crayon lines and touches as far as their quantity and quality go.

As a result his works tremble in constant movement as 'butterflies in the garden of art.', they glitter with bright colours and sound with tones of light, meant to create pastel luminosity. Not only does the artist tend to achieve the musical effect but he also makes his concert sound with the harmony of the most fluorescent glossy shades, a real 'live' concert.
Some of the works, accentuating the size, type and composition of colour patches approach in their character abstract compositions close to musical expression. They have also nothing in common with illusionary approach to colour, most of the colours there are intensively expressive. There are more astonishing shade contrasts and a very subjective general tone.
Pastel landscapes - gentle and fragile, faithfully reflecting nature. We are afraid that nature's images could run down a sheet of paper together with pastel powder like we are concerned about nature's durability. The background would be deprived of both rainbow hues, delicate tones, subtle lights and transparent shades.

The Third Journey - To Meet Time Enchanted in A Stone

Big historical cities. Smaller towns with great tradition. And unknown settlements which we go past on our way. In northern or southern Poland. And in the eastern parts of the country.
Each place has a small square with a parish church. Its towers dominate the roofs of other buildings. Baroque altars 'burst' the interiors.

On the outskirts of a town there is a monastery or a palace which forgot its prosperity a long time ago. Neglected gardens. Everything to see and a lot to forget. Fluent lines, which make forms three-dimensional, live on orange, green or red papers. This is the architecture preserved in drafts, woven from intensified contours, contributing to a more solid framework for these a bit unstable constructions.

Vertical dominants which only emphasise equilibrium and symmetry of a composition. What livens up these dreamy views is colour, surprising, not imitative arrangements of bright colours: sapphire or blue roofs and helmets of towers unpretentiously co-exist with walls in the colour of Burgundy wine. It is a vision of a skilled and sensitive colourist appreciating the potential of line. And again instead of objective descriptiveness and classical tranquillity - we obtain a kind of report based on poetic nostalgia.

We participate in a journey to meet the fossil history. To meet time in a standstill. That journey has begun and it is still going on...

Dariusz Leśnikowski