Marek Szczepaniak, Oracle, 2023

Marek Szczepaniak paints with both watercolors, oils and acrylics. He is a realist faithful to the tradition of the golden period of painting at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. In his opinion, today's painting is a shadow of that era, the era of giants and great masters. He is fascinated by the work of Sargent Soroll, Malczewski, Axentowicz, Weiss, Zorn or Monsted. In each of them he seems to see a love of truth, the beauty of the world, sincerity of expression and a certain optimism. He states: "So I take up my brush and paint figurative representations of beautiful women surrounded by nature, ethereal landscapes, imbued with natural manifestations of the animate and inanimate world that I love so much. I love because I know it. I love because the forest once saved my life, feeding me when I had nothing to eat. Like an autistic, I sometimes focus on a single physical phenomenon, the twitching of light on my skin or the splitting of it into photons when I walk over the edge of the roof of a snowy country house. So here there are no contemporary ideas, no place for rebellion, fear and uncertainty. There is only objective peace, the eternal order of things. It is what it is - let's paint the hell out of it and paint it decently, like we used to! I use the full color spectrum, play with colors in all kinds of ways, using clever tricks that create a visual language, understandable only on the unconscious eye-brain line. I want to trigger subconscious gestures and brushstrokes, to understand how to paint quickly and brilliantly. I want, I want earnestly with all my strength to say - free! I am free!"