Wlodzimierz Szwed
"A difference of line and structure"
Contemporary Painting
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Wlodzimierz Szwed was born March 28, 1959 in Czestochowa, Poland. He graduated from the Politechnika College of Krakau where he completed a 5 year major in achitectur and art.
Szwed operates with three distinct and reoccurring codes in his painting as a part of his formal art language. A demarcating square of dimension, a plane of shaped color, and the emerging painterly space as a result of the former distinctions.
1.) Formal quality of the square: The psychology of horizontal or vertical gravity that is usually found in picture sizes, is absent in Szwed's work. Height and depth counterweigh each other. His squares invite the eye to a meditative silence directed towards the inner part of the painterly space. This balance of the square enables the viewer to concentrate on the painterly depth, while allowing the artist a freedom of movement in the placement of his color planes.
2.) Rich pigment applications: An overall reduced color scheme of light grays, with accented blues and reds is consciously welded into spatial planes of painterly form. Delicate brush strokes, in layered strata, over day-long sessions, remain barely noticeable, and relay an enormous sensation of painterly structure. The transcendental element prevalent in modern polish art, has also played a conspicuous role in Szwed's work. Spatial composition, structural space in the color form are common means of painterly expression in modern Polish art. The painting of the renown Noveschelski, the Warsaw school, or even the textile art predominant at Lotz are examples for this. The artist accentuates the painterly spaces with the archaic of scriptural markings on the borders of these spatial forms. Because the monochrome spaces don't reveal their structural content immediately the accentuation of script brings about the recognition thereof, in the same way a red would accentuate a warm in a brown.
The experienced reality understood in Szwed's color spaces can never be replaced by projections of so-called virtual reality. Longing for personal identity, and the sense of home and individuality have been resolved in the artist's accentuated space of sublime color - for the artist as well as for any willing art observer. The work of Wlodek Szwed again proves, art can really have some personal bearing and ultimately make sense.
Cort Vallis, Stuttgart, January 2008
© 2001