Ryszard Woźniak

Z for Zenon
acrylic, canvas, 2020


A View on Art

Art is a positive manifestation of culture. It is an affirmation of the phenomenon of the visible world and the desire to experience its wondrousness in its fullness. Even critical art ultimately plays an integrative role, since it enables overcoming inner contradictions and conflicts of a given culture. In art, there is no such progress as we expect from science or technology; rather, art is expanding like the universe.

A universal language of art exists. Nature of the senses and laws governing perception are common to people, while the visual arts work with commonly recognisable means of expression and with concepts. Once, a universality of art was confined to the scope of a given culture; today, the point is that artistic production be comprehensible to all people on Earth. 

Art influences reality. Every art makes use of the image, while the capacity for image making is a figure of power. Artists endowed with this awareness employ actual tensions existing in contemporary world and join in a civilizational, social or political discourse.

The realm of art is a sphere of freedom. This means that within art, the human can realise their most ambitious, personal aims or desires. They may achieve insight into their own nature and into the nature of reality. In this sense, art is a cognitive practice. Every artistic practice is also a work on oneself, a way of discovering one's own potential, sensibility, force of imagination, and one's potential to influence others. In artistic practice, besides fluency in mastering means of utterance, an original approach, openness, inventiveness, and courage are of great significance. Precisely those features allow artists to create works that have not existed before or present traditional themes in a new manner. On the one hand, art is always contemporaneous to the times in which it is made, on the other, it is often ahead of its time, while artists anticipate future states of realness. Some works wait a long time for their assimilation in culture.

Art has a capacity for self-scrutiny. Art understood as science seeks incessantly for its own definition, doing so unsuccessfully. In this perspective, art is an incessant redefinition of art.

I remain grateful to Zenon Polus for the opportunity of co-creating a new school of art. The art university in Zielona Góra fitted well into the rich tradition of the place, and as for me personally, it facilitated my development. Thanks to his invitation, I collaborated with a range of remarkable artists-educators from nearly all over Poland and was offered an exceptional opportunity of influencing the shape of experiencing art in the youth we educated.