Order in chaos, or what the smell of rain looks like.

Karol and I are among the college-bound graphic designers. Karol teaches in Gdansk at the Academy of Fine Arts, I teach in Krakow. The academia in Poland cooperate and we meet from time to time at vernissages or major We meet from time to time at vernissages, major reviews of Polish graphic art or at conferences. conferences. We are also bound by our favourite technique of linocut. However, my research is mainly concerned with lines and I work in black and white. Karol, on the other hand is a master of colour. In Krakow, people talk about the Gdansk school of reductive linocut of reductive linocut. It is a technique used by artists such as: Janusz Akermann, Aleksandra Prusinowska, Magdalena Hanysz Stefańska and of those known to me, from this academy, also by Karol Lewalski. Briefly it consists of cutting out a layer of each colour and reflecting it onto paper. Layer upon layer of sometimes a dozen or so colours, layers form the final image. After the final print, the linoleum disappears or is discarded. This unique technique. It either comes out or it doesn't. Another layer changes the the image completely. Each of these artists uses this difficult technique differently. I am always impressed by prints made using this technique and I find it very difficult and requires patience. Interestingly, Karol writes in his texts that he dreams of tranquillity and peace. For this, his works are very diverse, but there are some that shout, impose themselves with colour, irritate with some kind of exaggeration and entice with a with a frenzy of colour. These works are full of heat, the intensity of experiences and temperament. and temperament. In another series, Karol is different again. Large-format prints sometimes cut out with a fine stitch of dots, reflected in shades of white or delicate pink, show us someone else. delicate pink, show us someone else. Is Charles a delicate, pastel, almost feminine in his aesthetic? Is Karol a a frantic seeker of strong colours, a sensation among the posters of naked, playful women hanging in a car workshop? The search for the self is evident in Karol's work. On this path of masculine experiences, we see two worlds. Which one would Charles like to live in? Then there is a series of prints that are subdued but expressive. In these works are strong, but there is also a search for harmony. In them, Karol juxtaposes in them large, strong in colour and form, abstract elements, setting them up as the protagonists of the painting. He sets them in the soft, exclusive space of an "American" interior architecture, and then places strange, small, colour-intensive objects, which are supposed to be traces of the stay of these elegant ladies smelling of Chanel No 5, or gentlemen in Armani shirts. Armani. White villas, the sound of waves, large windows and the decor of seemingly nonchalantly scattered, small sculptural forms that were set up for hours, to match the elegant interior. It is these works that I very much associate with Salvador Dalí. His paintings seem like dreamy visions, yet very yet very much at home in the interiors of large white villas. There is a snobbish note in snobbish note in Dalí. I also hear it in Charles. These are not prints for small, dark flats in blocks of flats. They are elegant, nonchalant creations for the large and beautifully lit living rooms of seaside villas. Of course, I have no idea if this was Charles' intention, but this is the feeling I get when I looking at this series of graphic works, beautiful and painterly in their form. Karol has a great sense of colour. I like his pastel, powdery colours but also the bright and psychedelic ones. Karol's two artist personalities, the one that loves the atmosphere of workshops cars, which would probably be sterile clean at his place, only smeared with grease on his cheek or the mechanic's white trousers. And the other artistic personality, presumed by me, is the elegant, superbly dressed, leaning against a sporty Aston Martin, beautifully scented, artist James, who gazes out at the horizon of the sky set against the sea with a beautiful woman at his side, who works in a beach house and no one knows about his hobbies because in front of the world he plays the tough guy. Of course, this tale of mine about Charles is a fable inspired by his work and the deeply hidden dreams he describes. Writers always have to explain their detective stories. An artist doesn't have to. The artist does what he wants. The artist, graphic designer Karol Lewalski, cuts his linolea floors so that magical, colourful stories emerge from under his chisel. Karol is a dreamer still looking for himself and his dream house on a dune. Karol gently and slowly reveals to us who he really is. Sam maybe he will find out too? Dr Marta Bożyk Academy of Fine Arts Cracow    

The light eyes of the heart... or the becoming of images We are used to thinking and saying in the art world that paintings 'make you think'. Images like people can indeed be impulses for thinking, experiencing and understanding the world. This is exactly what Karol Lewalski's paintings are, becoming signs of a rich life, visual symptoms of the colours of existence. Here before the viewer's eyes stretches a peculiar fullness of artistic form arising, I guess, from experiencing the artist's rich visual worlds. In the presented performances, it is precisely the richness of the fullness of the world that is experienced: it is not only looked at, but also admired, experienced and interpreted, and ultimately given artistic, and therefore refined and aesthetically cultured, expression.  Karol Lewalski's paintings 'give food for thought' for two general reasons in particular. The first is because they are 'powerful' images. In the reflection that deals with thinking and writing about paintings, we speak of 'strong' paintings when we see that life directly 'thickens' in them. The measure of a "strong" image becomes its expressive power, its visual ability to reflect and present the inexhaustible wealth of visible human reality. There is so much real life in them, which multiplies, enriches and expands in meaning when artistically transformed, and also allows interpretation, besides making the viewer look at himself, see, discover and analyse;  and perhaps above all to love? One feels in these paintings the amazement of visibility, which is increasingly rare today. Some expression of the experience of seeing in this way is the simple reaction of reception, the sudden almost physiological reflex, the necessity to even  an involuntary desire to tell someone else about them, someone who has not yet had the opportunity to see them or enjoy them; whether he could not saturate his senses with their  a sensitively created aesthetic.   For there is in these paintings everything that is most important for creativity: the freedom of seeing, the overlapping of sensations, the savouring of sensuality, even the silent admiration or pursuit of an ultimately unmatched visible human reality. And there is also noticeable here the artistic work on perceptual apprehension, the expression of everything that allows itself to be perceived, that tries to inspire the human gaze, that also goes beyond seeing, and that arises from the richness and vastness of existence - from nature in its broadest sense, through the human figure, especially the noteworthy fascination with female sexuality, and to attentiveness to what is elusive, what hides beneath the discreetly existing fabric of human corporeality, what is finally contained in the events of multidimensional presence and in the areas of human being between, and also with, others.  This brings us to the second reason that makes these images thought-provoking or reflective. I refer at this point to their visual or expressive  truth. Regardless of whether one believes the contemporary cultural post-truth, it is always important in perception whether an artistic creation is true, i.e. convincing, coherent or even visually plausible. This oeuvre presents itself as such. Here I want to particularly emphasise its artistic truth by drawing attention to its formal coherence and chromatic, colourful authenticity. These two expressive and aesthetic qualities mean that they don't exist alongside our visible and worn realities, but rather create new realities, allowing us to look at ourselves with new eyes, altered by the artist and his paintings. Thanks to the artistic effort of the creator's thoughts, even new images of the world are created. We follow the image and its creator with our eyes, as it were, and at the same time we can see  "differently". Which is, after all, what art is all about. What we have here is a seemingly ordinary, but in effect extraordinary new creative mimicry: insight into what exists is transformed here into artistic intervention, and the artistic form creates a visible interpretation of reality. Figuration, keeping up with its fulfilment, transforms into abstraction, which in turn wants to complete and express everything that cannot be seen and what cannot be easily seen. Here is the living and artistically becoming world in its fullness, in a process of continuous creation. The creator of these paintings does not wish to reproduce a real existing reality, but above all wants to organise it in the painting in such a way that it is visible in its non-obvious status and dynamic condition. As a result, what is obvious and has been seen many times becomes its desired opposite here - it is transformed into the unusual, the different, into some kind of attractive unveiling of existence. Stopped and re-created, the colours live their new true artistic life. They seem real, they convince our eyes and senses, although they are quite different from our everyday vision. For it is the creator of the paintings who has rearranged and organised them just for us. As if he wanted to say to us each time and in each new version: Look. Look how unusual, amazing, dynamic and multilayered our world is. Thus creating a new event especially for our use - a celebration of seeing, experiencing and understanding the world. Let us take a few  examples: The beachfront becomes here an extraordinary 'other' than in our usual vision of the place; or even such a common image as the view of the west, which here is transformed into a collage of the richness of life's shades; or, finally, the skirt in artistic transformation seems a captivating visual microcosm. And, seen hundreds of times, a walk with a dog reveals a literal visible fever of colours, forms and shapes, and an essentially expressed dynamic of seeing-perceiving-multiplying complexity of what can rarely impose itself on our eyes and senses in general.  What else is perhaps worth emphasising? Well, one thing for sure -  The images presented were certainly created from the "eye and mind" of their creator, thus becoming visually rational, legible, and cognitively and expressively formally rich. I can emphatically emphasise this quality of the work in question, which is something I would like to see happen more often in my adventures as a critic.  In a word, I could confidently call these images re-flexive, or those that have a dual effect on perception:  on the one hand, appeal to thinking and re-thinking, and on the other hand, become artistic re-flexes These images are, in a way, unveilings of an expanded world, enriched precisely by the creative expression and content resulting from the richness of the form. Such images have a duality valuable in their structure - they can be in fact both a thought about the world and the world itself, a world that is admittedly artificial, but nevertheless suggestive and aesthetically attractive, already living its life in the space of culture, allowing itself to be seen again and again and, most importantly, to be constantly re-interpreted, expanding our everyday world with an artistic worthy of attention.  dimension.  We need for a full democratic life reflective images that expand our existence, triggering a conversation, a meeting or an exchange of ideas - or even an argument over images. Karol Lewalski's paintings can successfully fulfil all these needs socially, having a valuable potential for discussion; they reveal something else that makes them all the more appealing to life - they combine reflection with emotion, with what I would call perhaps risky  the seeing eyes of the heart? The classical author wrote literally about the "enlightened eyes of the heart". In addition to the "eye of the mind" one can see in them the "eyes of the heart"  and a kind of visual ardour, which makes their long social existence all the more promising. I would like them, then, to convince visually, artistically and expressively other eyes, minds and hearts; being able to be mirrors of our realities; at the same time becoming precisely  linocut images of the colours of life.               And that, at the same time, they generate much-needed new ways of seeing the world, which, thanks to them, is still - hopefully not becoming - obvious.  After all, there is still alive in at least some of us, despite the changes and the networked development of an ever faster world, a true universal conviction to want to see and understand the world through the prism of thought-provoking - artistic images. Such, after all, are the long-established roots of our culture, which has lasted and will continue to come alive thanks to artistically/cognitively obliging images.  I believe Karol Lewalski's pictorial realities not only because they are reflective, but also because they are visually compelling - one might say artistically persuasive. No, they are too little and overly intellectually expressed. I rarely write this as a critic - I like them, and modestly so to say. The rest, for various reasons, if only critical distance, must remain silent.Zb

If a pedlar devil knocked on my door and offered my youth, I would shut the door in his face with a meaningful gesture. The reluctance to be young does not stem from the fear that this process is also connected with the "rejuvenation" of the brain, but rather from an awareness of what it is and what it "threatens". When one has climbed the mountain of life and has a wide horizon from here, and somehow the world in your grasp, a bit of self-confidence, you don't desire to return. Youth is a value that unfortunately passes. What remains is our experience, and may God grant that it be as great as possible, imbued with the wisdom that we can use, the ability to enjoy the moment and the fortitude the moment, and the fortitude that allows us to walk without bruises in this hunchbacked world. world. This is the thinking of an old professor who, let's not kid ourselves, sometimes envies of his young assistant's spurts of madness. This introduction is a dilemma, perhaps a paternal concern based on his own experiences. It is a reflection on the fate of the young artist Karol Lewalski, who still has a long way to go. Will he succeed as he assumes? Will he find his corner in the land of happiness, called art? Will he persevere in his resolutions? Because it may seem it may seem that all the places have been taken and all the questions have been answered. answers. Despite my misgivings, I will answer these questions straight away: yes, he will make it, I am sure of it, even though he has just knocked himself out of the starting blocks and the finish line far away. This is not fortune-telling, but a certainty derived from observing his person. One can present a list of his qualities, weave a paean laced with flowery words, which would support my thesis, but let's not talk about life, it's not about is not about laurels, which are only a brief moment of warmth. Karol Lewalski has taken up the challenge of being an artist. An artist, and yet yet he had the opportunity to make a different choice, a choice that would give him existential peace. him existential peace. He could have become, say, the director of a prosperous company, with, of course, the director of the company. of a prosperous company, of course, with a director's salary, a certain salary. salary. He decided to take up the pursuit of something that is more of an illusion than reality. He has taken to working in a fallow field, which more often yields calamities of crop failures than sweet fruit. So what motivates him? From what I can see, is passion, the desire to stand out from the grey commonness of an increasingly unified world and, above all, to define the meaning of existence. Against the fashions and media dictators, the temptations of the consumerist world, flies its banner. He wants to give life a colour, and even if it will even if it changes, it changes according to his dictates. He does not want to be a chameleon who to take on the colours of the crowd. He seems to have everything in front of him, because he is a rookie, but if you biography, he has already achieved a great deal: awards, exhibitions, significant results of his own art search. results of the search for his own art. When you are young and the medals orders begin to shine on your chest, on the one hand, it helps to endure the hardships of work and uncertainty of the future, but on the other hand, one can lose one's grasp of real assessment as a result of soda water hitting your head. Charles is in control and doing his own. He climbs the sharp wall to the desired ideal without looking down with fear. What matters is the here and now: the work and its purpose. Karol Lewalski has decided to also to be an educator. We work together. Working with him, in my opinion, is a symbiosis. We run a studio which is attended by young students with little experience. Karol's age advantage over them may seem may seem small, but it is only mathematics, whereas in the way he works is noticeable. Lewalski is a born pedagogue who acts as a great liaison between me and the students. He is there where my sense of responsibility for the whole may not see the important details of the needs of young people. He doesn't play the older man because he doesn't need to, as he perfectly senses the didactic situations where he should show confidence. Linocut is not a technique as old as the world, but it originated from an old one, and it may come as a surprise that Karol has chosen it as a tool for self-expression. It is not easy, the effort is great but, nevertheless, it is close to him: more difficult than, say, digital techniques, with which he is perfectly familiar. techniques, which he knows very well. The important thing for him is not ease, but the nature of the technique, which determines the final shape of his work. work. The poetics of the technique and its possibilities captivate Karol, so he dances with graceful figures. He operates it with great virtuosity, he controls the orchestra like a conductor over the orchestra. The process of colour linocut, those who have done it perfectly knows how complicated it is, how laborious, how quickly it can cool down an inexperienced artist's the artistic drive of an inexperienced artist. There is not much to say: Karol has what he conceives, what he feels, the plate and linocut tools do. It seems that everything in this discipline is subservient to him, we do not we do not feel the effort of work, but only the essence of creation. To envy! I feel under my skin that I have made little of myself, because the richness of Karol's work is much greater than I have presented. I know this, but I also do it deliberately, because art is an area of subjective creation and perception of the world. and perception of the world. It is not the word that is supposed to define it, but its visual shape. Each of us presents, creates and perceives differently, and that's fine. Any guidance and signposts may not be helpful, but simply unnecessary, misleading, because everyone should find their way in this land to a large degree to a large extent alone. The path taken by Karol Lewalski is, in my view, convincing, so interesting and full of colourful emotional phrases that I I am happy to follow it. I feel invited and I accept the invitation. Perhaps it is a poorly tailored suit of words that was meant to 'dress up' his art. Perhaps it is the result of a subconscious jealousy of youth, for despite all the same, I feel the hint of it and the pleasing sound of it. When I look surreptitiously at Charles, at his youthful impulses, at his raptures, which I cannot (?) I simply cannot, because my age, because the fire of youthful exuberance has already more than a little dimmed in me. And it is not only jealousy of youth in the physical physically, but above all emotionally. There is much of beauty. Beauty, by me known, but a spark of anxiety stings that something I have overlooked, what if I did it again? This is perhaps the reason for giving my soul to the devil, to be able to experience things as Charles does now. Waldemar J. Marszałek