oil / canvas
185 x 120 cm
The creative attitude of ARS-HORME restrains spontaneous reflexes of imagination and directs imagination in favor of painstaking artistic realizations in order to give perfection to the work - Boguslaw Szwacz, Ars-HORME Art Manifesto, Osieki 1977[1].
Boguslaw Szwacz - painter, draughtsman, sculptor and academic educator. From 1931 to 1937 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow under the direction of, among others, Teodor Axentowicz and Xawery Dunikowski. He was a co-founder of several art groups: Grupa Młodych Plastyków in 1946 (which in time merged with II Grupa Krakowska), Le Surréalisme Révolutionnaire in 1948, and Modern Art in 1957. In 1947, as a scholarship holder of the Ministry of Culture and Art, he went to Paris for a year, where he established numerous contacts with avant-garde artists, including Léger, From 1948 to 1962, he taught at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. Since 1956, he popularized his original concept of art "Ars-Horme" - "Art of Moving the Imagination," which aims to deepen man's harmony with the outside world and stimulate his imagination in the spiritual and material spheres. The source of the concept was opposition to the changes in art initiated by Duchamp, which, he argued, falsified the creative process by replacing it with the need for freedom, and negated the specificity of the work of art by equating it with the phenomena of life. Szwacz announced the manifesto of his artistic theory in 1977 at an open-air workshop in Osieki.
The large-format composition from 1975 is an excellent example of "Ars-Horme" painting. Boguslaw Szwacz masterfully combined in his art motifs taken from the organic world of nature, as well as the products of human culture. The inspiration of nature is manifested, for example, in the selection of subtly nuanced earth colors broken by stronger accents of red or blue. The entire composition, however, does not resemble living organisms, but rather a monumental page from a mysterious book sprinkled with disturbing abstract shapes. The borders are inscribed with small signs from an unknown alphabet - the artist not infrequently processed the writings of various civilizations for his needs: Chinese, Hebrew or Arabic. As the critic Zbigniew Taranienko wrote, Szwacz's paintings feature "points, spatial speckles, pictograms, bands of arabesque notations, firm lines of force, materialized signs, mysterious symbols [...]. They form clear clusters, regular arrangements, scattered constellations. They restore harmony through the radiation of light, uniformity of color tones and intensity of values. Musical rhythms are formed in the largest paintings"[2]. Using these means, Boguslaw Szwacz created his own unique (though speaking of universal issues) painting language, which is perfectly evident in the presented work.
[1] Boguslaw Szwacz. Painting Ars-Horme, brochure accompanying the exhibition at Studio Gallery, edited by Z. Taranienko, Warsaw 1984, p. nlb.
[2] Ibid.
