Untitled. No. 15

Having graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw (1981), Waldemar Umiastowski produced works in the spirit of Neo-expressionism, a style current in Poland throughout a portion of the 1980s decade and involving creators united by their contestation of the Communist reality, including the official art market, and in the matters art, by the innovativeness of their explorations, by references to unbridled imagination, and by formal and intellectual vigour of their art. In that period, Umiastowski employed hastily drawn pictograms referring to street life and made use of religious and political themes. Paint, applied with a forceful gesture, ran down his canvases; drawings, captions and decorative borders densely filled the surfaces of his works, crating the feeling of all-encompassing chaos.

Around the year 1987 Umiastowski quite abruptly abandoned the imagery distinctive to Neo-expressionism. He radically simplified the language of his artistic statement; he started to cover the surfaces of his canvases with large areas of paint and limited his repertoire of motifs to a small number of geometric elements referring to architectural forms. He also severely restricted his palette; from then on, it was dominated by dull brown, blue-grey and grey hues, as well as brown-black rust that imitated antique gold.

Umiastowski’s ascetic canvases can be treated as his personal commentary on the subject of art and creativity. The shift in his painterly language resulted from the change in his artistic approach and was to a large extent ethical in nature. Discipline which Umiastowski imposed on form, colour and the presented world made it possible for him to focus on painting as such and on the organic components of the image. The arches, arcades and slanting lies seen in his canvases can be seen as an allusion to shapes and objects of the world which Umiastowski almost completely eliminated from his artistic explorations in order not to be distracted; his attention was not to be turned away from the properties and values of painting. In his works, the texture, colour and form constitute an unified whole; it is these three elements that are involved in the dialogue referring to the image and the painterly gaze that extracts archetypal shapes, the primary elements of human imaginarium, from reality. Umiastowski’s rigorous stance resulted in artistic statements which are stern and which generate fundamental questions regarding the truth and the possibility of translating reality into the language of imagistic, narrative and allegorical qualities of a representation, and, ultimately, regarding the autotelic nature of painting.

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translated from Polish by Klaudyna Michałowicz