Andrzej Nowacki. Exploring the square

Room 2: The lyricism of colours
 

During the second half of the 1990s, an essential change gradually occurred in the interior of the relief. The broad range of dancing figures on the square picture surface was reduced; the pulsing rhythm slowed down; the colours were often dampened and took on soft velvet tones. In time, the diagonal alignment gave way to a vertically structured order, as though the reliefs were internally straightening themselves up. Activity gradually began to concentrate around the central vertical axis, a new and important element in the structure of the picture. Vertical, rarely horizontal, lines crossed through the square, bundled parallel to each other. Of the geometric forms, only the reduced, at times even miniaturised square (less frequently, a circle) remained, as though shrunk into itself to form a discreet dot, even a dab of colour. (Figs. 07, 08, 09, 10, 11) The pictures were no longer given a title; instead, the date of completion was added as a kind of signature. According to the artist, these images are like pages from a diary that recorded his current emotional state and the degree of density of the energy. This remains his consistent approach even today.

The catalogue accompanying the second exhibition in Kraków in 2002 states the following: “Nowacki trusts his intuition. He feels free, which paradoxically goes hand in hand with the almost radical reduction in form and colour. Now, the role of the wooden spars laid onto the image surface changes. They no longer separate the fields of colour from each other, but instead – positioned against the monochrome background and having become independent – they gradually become the most important element in the image composition.”[3] In the next catalogue, issued one year later, we read: “With all the limitation of the repertoire of form to two basic elements – the square and the vertical straight line – the connection between the two arising from the contradictory symmetry forms created by them generates a tension and animation that are intrinsic to the painting, and which can be felt by the observer through their sense of their own body symmetry and awareness of their bodily movement. The reliefs created in 2001 in particular, with their visually more distinct, not to say dominant, central axis, follow the bilateral symmetry of the human body structure. In an abstract manner, by describing this symmetry axis in the square, they create the same impression as Leonardo da Vinci’s famous sketch of the proportions of the human body, which he drew inside a point-symmetric circle and square.”[4]