Harmony and Colour

Iwo Zaniewski • 11 December 2022

I work with traditional oil painting, drawing upon the history of figurative art and portraying subjects from everyday contemporary life. My compositions do not reference specific geographic locations. However, I tend to refer to some places through the symbolism of colours and the character of light. What fascinates me in paintings is the interplay of different elements and unconventional ways in which they affect one another, as well as colour combinations which we would never think of when it comes to clothes or interiors. When put together in the right way within a painting, they evoke powerful and distinct emotions that are rather impossible to express when using other means. 

Colour is a vital element of my artworks. Although the juxtaposition of shades and hues I use is often contrasting, their convergence is simultaneously soft, gentle, and devoid of deliberately provoked dissonance. I reach for expressive (but not entirely abstract) forms because they add dynamics and more intensively absorb the eye of the viewer on an aesthetical level. What you initially see in my new paintings is often a polychromatic blur, but with time you start to notice tangible, familiar shapes. This dance of forms, as I like to call it, is a maze of colour and structures that gradually reveal concealed reality. The visual dialogues between forms, light, and layers of colour ultimately highlight the mood rather than the action of events I portray. 

The subject of visual harmony is something I’ve been studying all my life. In 2018, I joined a team of aesthetics scholars, visual psychologists, and neurology researchers who conducted extensive theoretical and practical research into the mechanism governing this phenomenon. The outcome – Algorithm of Harmony – is a concept illustrated by a mathematical formula. My ultimate goal as a painter is to reach a state of perfect visual harmony. To achieve it, I’ve been following compositional principles and constructing paintings in a way that each element of the composition becomes irreplaceable support for the arrangement of the others.

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