TRAGEDY AND GESTURES. Flight and Invention in the Painting of Wiesław Szamborski

“Let us not be ashamed to flee.”

St. Ambrose, De fuga saeculi (c. 391)

The flowering of independent culture in Poland fell in the crisis years of the 1980s, the decade of the “Solidarity” upheaval and martial law, when the political opposition undertook a series of initiatives, private and ecclesial, aimed at creating at least minimal conditions for the development of Polish national culture “in a bad time.” This does not mean that the question of independence may today be considered already historical, or that one should not look for a connection between the spirit of the anti-communist upheaval and the aspirations of the present day with its numerous spiritual threats. It is worth, in the work of still-active artists such as Wiesław Szamborski, discovering and strengthening the hidden universalism of their works, rooted in the Christian theology of spirituality. The motif of flight (Lat. fuga – flight, pursuit, exile) is timeless and always current, as St. Ambrose showed when discussing the biblical figures of flight in the treatise De fuga saeculi. Already in the treatise of Philo of Alexandria Περί φυγής και ευρέσεως (c. 10–35), known in Latin as De fuga et inventione (On Flight and Finding), flight, usually born of hatred, fear or shame, was linked through biblical images with invention, flight with finding. This is therefore not merely an instinctive (atavistic, self-preserving), practical, aesthetic (escapist) or hedonistic motive, nor a psychiatric one, that is, connected with the unproductiveness or morbidity of flight which in extreme cases results in loss of memory and the disintegration of identity, but above all a wise and moral act. The iconography of flight is vast. Flight is found in literature, the visual arts (even in architecture) and music. Everyone experiences flight to some degree, and its causes and aims vary, as do its forms. Flights may be honourable or unworthy, forced or free, tragic or happy, open or hidden, evident, discreet or disguised, also in Szamborski's inventive and at times allusive images.

Wiesław Szamborski was born on 6 May 1941 in Skarżysko-Kamienna. From 1960 to 1966 he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, Faculty of Painting and Graphic Arts, in the studios of, among others, Michał Bylina, Stefan Gierowski, Antoni Łyżwański and Andrzej Rudziński. After his studies he exhibited jointly with Marek Sapetto (until 1974) and co-created the current of New Figuration in painting. They took part in the 5th and 6th exhibitions of Realist Painters (1967, 1968). The young painter rebelled above all against the post-Kapist colourism, discredited in the socialist realist period, especially that of Jan Cybis, who scorned great questions of history as he would any anecdote; then against abstractionism in its extreme variants (lyrical-hot or cold, post-constructivist or minimalist), and in time against conceptualism undermining the sense of painting, that is, an anti-formalism that was the last breath of modernists leaving the stage. From 1968 to 2011 Szamborski worked at his alma mater. In June 1990 he was nominated associate professor, and in 1996 he attained the title of full professor. In 1987–88 he was pro-dean of the Faculty of Painting, and from 1991 head of the Department of Painting and Drawing, leading painting studios for students in years II–V. In the 1980s he actively took part in the independent culture movement. The exhibition, gathering over a dozen paintings from 1964–2013 drawn from the artist's collection and the Museum of the Warsaw Archdiocese, is a modest attempt to recall this thread of his life and work.

Flight in Szamborski's painting would be an act of gradual turning away, abandoning, and inventive construction, grounded existentially and religiously, of distance from the social and artistic reality of the time. Flight here does not, however, mean simple and unproductive escape from political conditions, prevailing artistic tendencies or painterly fashions, but rather…