Conversation with Wojciech Fangor about the Paintings of Antoni Starowieyski

Stefan Szydłowski: Antoni Starowieyski is virtually the only painter whose work you have recently noticed and praised.

Wojciech Fangor: He surprised me with his significant commitment to visual poetry. I especially liked his 2004 Interior and bought the painting for myself. I was also impressed by his nude self-portrait, the values of which I discussed with Janusz Miliszkiewicz, an art journalist whom I’ve already granted several interviews about my work.

Stefan Szydłowski: How do you understand the term ‘visual poetry’?

Wojciech Fangor: I was impressed by how Antoni achieves major visual and aesthetic values by means of contrast: sharp edge – soft edge, light – shadow, warm – cool, green – red, flat – dimensional. When used skilfully, all these contrasts, which are the rudiments of art, create the painting’s visual values.

It is thanks precisely to this profound knowledge of painting technique that Antoni is not afraid of trivial subjects: a ploughed field, a corridor, a smokestack on the horizon, clothes left on the wall. It is precisely the ordinariness of the subject that allows painting to bring visual language into play.

Stefan Szydłowski: Today, artists often become involved in politics, ecology – defending, attacking, valuing, passing judgements.

Wojciech Fangor: I believe that the right path for a visual artist is as follows: a minimum of anecdote and shock and a maximum of visual language. This is the prerequisite of a work based on a harmony of contrasts, when the painter avoids becoming entangled in other matters, in which he risks being manipulated by politicians, businessmen and others.

Stefan Szydłowski: In such matters words are hardly sufficient, it is very hard to clearly and precisely define your position.

Wojciech Fangor: When talking about painting, about paintings, you have to remember about the difference between illustration, decoration, and painting. Illustrating is something else than painting.

Stefan Szydłowski: That’s right, but we live with our eyes open and we want to be sharing our feelings and opinions.

Wojciech Fangor: True, artists too participate in life in various ways and sometimes, influenced by emotions or personal engagement, they subordinate their visual language to the subject. Artists do have such temptations and I had them too. A very well-known example of this situation is Pablo Picasso’s Guernica.

Stefan Szydłowski: A very important painting, one attesting to the artist’s great courage.

Wojciech Fangor: It is a matter of our reaction to the world. Not everything is possible. You can’t paint Guernica, you can’t paint the Holocaust, you can’t paint Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. The subject is not painterly material, it has to become ‘domesticated’ to become such material, so that it is painting that constitutes its principles of existence rather than being subordinated to something fundamentally different than itself. There is always a thin line of division between art and ‘life’, a line that is crossed easily in one direction only. And then there is more propaganda, moralising, illustration. Art is precisely what Antoni Starowieyski does – making beautiful, important and valuable something that most people regard as banal and insignificant.

Błędów, March 2012