Such a Landscape

Already a few years after his graduation, Zakrzewski consciously formulated the goals to which he would be devoted. When creating still lifes in the 1970s, he assumed that only the object in its simplest form was suitable for expressing his world. Today one might add: “my own landscape.”

Landscape in Zakrzewski’s work is deeply connected to personal history and memory. The artist’s father, Vladimir Zakrzewski, devoted his mature years to landscape and introduced his son to its secrets. However, this one rejected mimeticism, taking up the “landscape challenge” years later, when he reworked the language of geometry and analysis of asemantic visual structures. His concept of the linear landscape focused on spatial relationships, derived from physical laws rather than artistic conventions.

Zakrzewski confesses: “In painting I want to reflect the truth of reality, its essence – not its image. We experience the heavy and the light, the happy and the sad, the noise and the silence. The truth of existence is that there are fleeting things and those whose gravity crushes us. And I have to resolve how to do this as an artist. This has become the main task of my works.”

Zakrzewski counts among his special artistic experiences moments when the landscape “forced” him to paint. An example is the “Warwick motif,” a painting of a tree, a farmer’s house and a silo, which made a huge impression on him. “The basic idea is to surrender to intuition. I can recognize what is accurate, what contains truth.”

Zakrzewski’s adopted notion of “Such a landscape” can also be understood as an internal landscape, related to the matter of life, emigration, return to Poland, and memory, which is formed as a spatial structure. In his words: “I paint the past, but I always leave something behind.”

Zakrzewski’s “battles,” which are imaginative palimpsests of space and time, are a unique kind of landscape. They combine historical battlefields into a single abstract composition. “Maps of battles,” says the artist, ”movements of armies, directions of attacks. Rectangles, rhombuses, squares, total abstraction, and behind it so much human fate, blood, historical changes.”

Zakrzewski’s work also includes neon installations, such as “Free City of Gdansk,” where he mapped historical boundaries with neon signs, symbolizing the transience of space and time. Sound is also an important component of his works, complementing the visual compositions, giving them additional depth.

In projects such as “What Did the Cricket Say on the Beach in Chalupy,” the artist explores post-humanist viewpoints in an attempt to read the “speech” of the cricket. The landscape in his work moves from mimetics to “color samples” – monochromatic canvases that become a minimalist spiritual and emotional challenge.

Zakrzewski’s landscapes bring out special moments when the artist feels the fullness of creation. They are like happy places, but aware of transience, marked by the shadow of the Smętek.