Janusz Miliszkiewicz
A+ | ResetYour Style → View original as PDF.
For Roman Zakrzewski, ideal beauty is hidden in the face of every woman.
Zakrzewski paints contemporary girls like Renaissance Madonnas.
The beauty of a model is not important to him. Everything is the matter of playing with imagination.
A woman is the protagonist of Roman Zakrzewski’s paintings. Almond, half-closed eyes. Slender faces with features so delicate that they are almost unreal. Slightly elongated neck, similarly to models from Modigliani’s canvasses. Noble proportions of hands folded in symbolic gestures like Renaissance Madonnas. Composition of paintings refers above all to iconic tradition. Limited range of colours, as if they were faded, and unique harmony which add not only to aesthetical, but also mystical value of the painting. The artist, in spite of the cruelty of contemporary world, is attempting to express the brightest side of existence using the art of painting. This is why he portrays contemporary Madonnas.
Zakrzewski was born in 1955 and for a long time nothing indicated that he will devote himself to art. He started studies at Academy if Fine Art at the age when others usually completed their academic education. He was learning art in Cracow from Jerzy Nowosielski himself, and the exhibition of his and Nowosielski’s paintings (1986) is for Zakrzewski the most important achievement in his artistic output. In the catalogue from Zakrzewski’s exhibition, professor Nowosielski wrote: " Again we have a painter who amazes us. Perhaps, Modigliani resurrected and returned to finish his work in a different climate and conditions. And when I see that a young artist takes up directly the ‘experience’ of another artist, who died prematurely 60 years ago, who in a way incorporates himself in the artist’s professional life, deepening, finishing and implementing what the other one did not manage to do, I suppose that I am facing a great mystery of development of art, the one that fearful people will not dare to speak of, but which, to my joy, has been revealed unexpectedly ".
Janusz Miliszkiewicz, Your Style, (no.3 (March) 1999 p.128).
