On a work-study trip to Switzerland he must have made the decision to remain on west side of the Oder-Neise river border (Germany). Those were the years of the iron curtain, and of course it wasnt easy to plan a trip to the west of Europe. That same year Wodek Szwed arrived in Schorndorf. As we can see, he must have liked the city and its people so much that he decided to stay on for good. In fact he has become a regular contending factor in the cultural setting of the community. Szwed operates with three reappearing codes in his painting as a part of his formal art language. The square of demention, the plane of his color shapes, and the space as a happening in itself. 1.) The square, out of which several of his presented works are formed, presents a formal quality. The psychology of horizontal or vertical gravity that we usually find dominanting in lengthly pictures, is not at all present here. Heigth and depth simply out-balance each other. Thus the square invites the eye to a meditative silence towards the inner part of the painterly space. This balance which the square offers helps us then to concentrate on the painterly depth, while allowing a sphere for the placement of Szwed´s color planes.

2.) The rich pigment application such as is the case with the artists blue or black, are conciously welded into the spacial planes of painterly forms. The tiny brush strokes, painted in layers in day long sessions remain barely noticable, and relay an enormous sensation of painterly structure. A strong transzendental element within modern polish art has also played a noticeble role in Szweds art. Space composition, structural space, and form space are important means of relaying meaning in art in Poland today. The painting of the renown Noveschelski, the Warsaw school, or even the textile art predominant at Lotz are examples for this. Vodek Szwed ascentuates the painterly spaces with the archaic of scriptual markings on the borders of these spacial forms. Because the monochrome spaces dont reveal their structural content immediately the actcentuation of script brings about the recognistion thereof, in the same way a red would acentuate a warm in a brown.

3.) The secret of Vodek Szweds art is concentrated in the painterly and structural space beyond meer decorative or functional of the picture: Still I want to stress that it takes more than just the application of color or contruction of a sqaure to create space. The spacial element in the square and the space of structural painterly space appear in a complexity of a paradox. This paradox allows that the spacial dominance of either of the two spacial forms is neutralized to the advantage of a hovering in the state of between (compare Heisenbergers principle of relativity). What happens is that after a while the eye begins to transzend in a state of between in the sphere (paionterly space) of the color plane. We call this experienced transzending into a space that in reality does not exist at all. The resulting time-space awarenes is experience in the space of the picture as well as within ourselves. Through such art experience, we, the observer come closer to understanding what the real meaning of freedom might mean. Vodek Szweds doesn´t deny that his aim is the creation of art space.

According to my observation he might very well be searching for an own recognizable identidy in these spaces, such that art can afford. As for many artists the world of art relates a personal world of home in a foreign and perhaps troubled situation - there in his enttrusted vision of color, space and form. Its that poetic relationship of the solitary to the solitary of life, which the French writer, Albert Camus once related, that we also find in the tranzendental of Wlodek Szweds color spaces.

The artists own world in the the art since has little to do with national affinity. Its arriving at a identidy related moment in an art work, in the observation and transzending moment of any contemporary artwork.

In the age of computors and digital communication the reality presented through such color spaces can never be replaced through the projection of socalled virtual reality. The longing for personal identidy, home, and individuality are nevertheless eingelost in color spaces,for the artist as well as for serious observers of art. As the work of Wlodek Szwed again prove, art can really transmit meaning.