Aleksander Żywiecki facebook/alzyw IDEOLOGICAL ASSUMPTIONS OF ALEKSANDER ŻYWIECKI’S PAINTING Aleksander Żywiecki’s painting the embodies an ideal of art, which the artist described at the beginning of his creative path. His assumptions are that art ought to meet two basic requirements: it must satisfy aesthetic needs and act on emotions. Thus beauty and the mood of a picture, and the associated emotions are, as he believes, necessary factors of art in general and also the signs which distinguish his own works. The ideal of beauty and emotionality well corresponds with the landscape painting, the genre in the artists oeuvre best represented. Beauty and nature are, in the painter’s view, inextricably bound, as nature creates the most aesthetic forms and colors. Besides its beauty, nature also has a strong emotional appeal. Monumentality of forms found in nature, its elemental forces and the variety of its manifestations associated with the changing weather and altering the seasons are the factors affecting mood, which ranges from the feelings of horror to such emotions as joy, reverie or sense of peace and calmness. In the paintings of Aleksander Żywiecki nature is in a stable relationship with the beauty and mood. Beauty, nature and emotions create a triad of concepts defining the ideal of art, which is pursued by Żywiecki in his artistic investigations. Emotional images of nature have not been invented by Aleksander Żywiecki. The tradition of landscape painting, in which the accent falls on the mood and emotionality, was initiated in the second half of the Nineteenth century by the representatives of the style called stimmung. Żywiecki, cannot therefore be described as a progressive painter or a reformer in the field of art. However, his determination to remain faithful to the old and outdated values in the Twenty-First century, such as beauty, affection and love of nature is intentional. By creating landscapes emotional and aesthetic in their form, the author openly protests against the Twenty-First culture, pop culture and postmodern art, which, he thinks, too often shows the ugliness instead of beauty and distances itself to delicate feelings and emotions. Contemporary cinema, three-dimensional movie, music and commercials provide extreme experiences, for which the society of the era of the digital technology, computer games and hypermarkets is craving. Żywiecki does not accept the dehumanized world, controlled by electronic inventions; he manifests his disagreement for the dehumanization of society by painting expressive, deep emotional landscapes. Landscape showing nature as a treasure trove of subtle emotions and beauty is for Aleksander Żywiecki not only the means of challenging the modern art, which denies that emotional experience or aesthetic pleasure may be an objective of painting, but also - and perhaps primarily – it is for him the means of communication. Żywiecki uses different states of nature which build the mood of a painting as a kind of code, by which the author communicates with his audience. Climatic landscape painted by the artist is a record of his own the feelings experienced while communing with nature. Similar emotions are to be awaken in the recipient while he contemplates the image on the canvas and recollects the states of mind he once experienced observing and outdoor scene. Thus, the landscape, pervaded by a certain mood is a medium of dialogue between the artist and a viewer; the conversation between the two is possible due to the affinity between the states of nature, observed in the past, and the states of mind. Communication and comprehensibility of the expressed moods is an important feature of Żywiecki’s paintings. Insisting on clarity of message formulated to the audience the artist rebels against the modern Academic art, which, as he writes in his article Why do we need this Art is a contemporary artistic strategy according to which nothing counts except the need of permanent self-creation, which ignores and disrespects all rules, which easily reduces the artists dialogue with the recipient to something totally incomprehensible – to a talk with lack of a common reference plane – to a monologue of the author.” To break the persistent in the Arts Academic monopoly of the unreadible, incomprehensible art Żywiecki focussed his artistic energy on the kind painting, in which the message is relatively simple, where there is an instant agreement between the author and the recipient which is based on the community of their experiences and feelings; the medium of the dialogue between the artist and his public is the landscape. Dialogue with the viewer, emotionality, the nature and aesthetic pleasure of the receiver are the most important elements of the ideal of art, which Żywiecki set for himself and to which he subordinated his art so as to oppose the dominant trends in art criticism and culture in his contemporary times. THE DNIESTR AT DAWN oil on canvas, 13cmx18cm, 2008, DNIESTR O ŚWICIE 13x18 2008
Posted on: Sat, 13 Sep 2014 20:29:33 +0000