arek Kwaszkiewicz born in 1943 in Skierniewice, Poland. Debut in 1969 in The Contemporary Art Gallery "At Boguccy" in Warsaw.
Kwaszkiewicz began with the decidedly figurative presentations. His figuration seemed at that time to be brave and brutal, strongly deforming, and ad the same time it was maturely formed from the very beginning. When in the first dawning of 70-ties, marked with autodidact's brand, he was struggled with his debut, Janusz Bogucki duly appreciated his art's originality. In the Contemporaneous Gallery, which is legendary today, this inappreciable creator of artists and plastic tendencies was exhibiting several times the works of Kwaszkiewicz, showing him into the World of artistic life through the frontal entry.
There was no doubt - among the artists, looking for an original representing form to express their pronouncement, Kwaszkiewicz was one of the most precious findings.His drawings made with the ball-pen, an instrument which is not used too often through the professionals, were especially fascinating. An unusual modeling's softness comported with a specific ink's colour in this case: he almost never kept the substantial black, usually it was broken through violets, dark rouges and bronzes. The extinguished colours of this brown World represented the true mind of his nightmare: morbid ugliness as well as expanse of sadness. The fantasy of an artist was turning at that time around the anthropoidal monsters. The horizon of such figurativeness was fully paved with silhouettes of puffed trunks, thighs and buttocks. It is everything very distorted and strongly erotic.
Today, after 25 years, as a result of not very exposed, but intimate evolution, in the last paintings of Kwaszkiewicz, among many signs and symbols, it is possible that they suggest the ceremonial tattoos of ritual exotism or the stylistics of tribal masks, it is not possible to find even any ancestors' shadow of that debuting period. It was a fact, it passed away. An artist threw over a drawing and he entirely abandoned himself to painting. His creative enthusiasm of the present day, analogous to dynamics of the last, represented presently compositions, may be surprising for many people.
Kwaszkiewicz deserves again to be discovered and launched.
Absent for many years on a plastic scene, exhibiting sporadically and without any special concern of criticism, which was absorbed with conceptualism firstly, and then with anarchising activity of the new savages, and the most readily, embittered through post-modernism, now he should not to be missed. He appeared as an authentic creator, listened intently to his internal time and consequent regarding his artist's passion. He did not yield to any galloping fashion. He kept his independence and he did not get any popularity. He still somewhere on side, closed into the studio with his,solitude, not showing any special enthusiasm to allow his art to be confronted in public. He acts with flights, but recklessly.
Just now he outlives the period of constructive activity. The work embraces him in fully, giving him at the same time the possibility to fulfil himself physically while battle with the great planes of paintings. He is like entranced, he connects an intensity of effort with great emotional stress. He does not like to talk about that what he is painting, he does know how to do it and he does not need it at alI. Yet, according to the convention, he found it necessary to insert few words of comment into the newest catalogue of exhibition, but the really truth is that only the opinions of few precious authorities are important for him.
Kwaszkiewicz of 90-ties is an amazing painter, young in spirit and mature, trusting in his narrative and colouristic intuition. It does not happen to often to see such coloured acting like on his paintings. This is the I fight's colour. Both the iIlusive profundities and the canvases' surfaces ironed out emanate of it. And in the meantime, in the surfaces of these compositions, full of painting breath, all kinds of signs show up: sometimes they are readable directly, sometimes - allusive, and another time they are circumscribed impulsively and they involuntarily delimit the intricate meanders.
Everyone who will allow be involved into the atmosphere of this magic art, will feel a hot and tropical night discovering some mysterious spectacle. That is the spectacle of throbbing somewhere fire, rhythmical music and a dance full of some mysterious meanings. There are the silhouettes' contours gleaming with brilliance of lights in the darkness and the margins of objects displace themselves, they coincide, grow gigantic. Any moment, everything will plunge into dark. It will be possible
to stage only a fragment of that world, in a little room of gallery in Warsaw. But even that episodic
exhibition may draw more than one tender eye. It will be duly appreciated by those, who did not lose their faith in the magnetic force of painting and they like to move around a complicated map of easel painting.
Warsaw, in May of 1997 Wojciech Krauze
