Marek Sołtysik — Sen zimowy

The technical proficiency of the young painter Marcin Kołpanowicz is unsettling, almost otherworldly. Using only pastels, he has captured the unique aura of the Stara Galeria (10 Starowiślna St.), displaying dozens of paintings.

Young Kołpanowicz (young—because his father, Andrzej, is also a painter possessed by the magical spirit of surrealism) graduated from the Kraków Academy of Fine Arts. He has exhibited worldwide, and now, following the voice of Leonardo da Vinci, he has presented "Images of Various Areas" in the very heart of these ruthless times—pastels about which he writes with striking unpretentiousness:

"I reach for pieces of colored clay and rub them against the rough surface of cardboard—and the drawings created in this way are meant, in a magical way, to provide food for me and my family."

With great suggestive power, Marcin Kołpanowicz gifts every viewer with his vision of the world, making him—as an artist—immortal. How long and with what tenderness must one gaze into the sky to see the "Blue Annex" known from the backstreets of old Kazimierz... or, gazing into an annex, apply a simple yet fascinatingly colored and uniquely structured film of the sky onto it?

A piece of top-tier literature is "Apelles and the White Horse"—an introduction by Tadeusz Nyczek in the artist’s catalog. Here is an excerpt: "Someone might say that Marcin K. is, after all, just one more of the quite abundant family of metaphorists occupied with looking for mystical holes in the completely real, even painfully so, landscape of our gray existence. True. Just as it is true that this real world of ours is only a mystical hole in the real, painfully so, landscape of the incomprehensible cosmos."

Exhibition of excellent painting open until January 22nd.

(...) Surrealist painting —such as that practiced by Kołpanowicz—belongs to the movement of metaphorical art. The artist allows himself free associations, and the logic of dreams rules here. In the early 1980s, the Kraków painter became known as a virtuoso who seamlessly connects the hard and rough with the intangible and unreachable—tenement walls with the sky, for instance. Back then, he proved his technical mastery; today, he shows works that are not merely a fragment of a poem or a sentence of a dazzling phrase. They are complete, exquisitely constructed works. Artistic means of expression protect this painting from being accused of excessive "literariness." (...) The height of finesse in combining pastel technique, poetry, and suggestive power is "Winter Dream." In this intimate, almost private painting, the matter is as simple as beauty can be: here, winter departs in places where the landscape is obscured by a loved one.