Henryk Stażewski

Building, construction, structure as a medium that testifies to both the permanence and development of the world. The idea of the superiority of mathematics and geometry over inner emotions being the guarantee of man's individuality, and therefore the harbinger of a certain disorder. For Henryk Stażewski, one of the most important precursors of constructivism in Poland, a science based on the repetition of accepted patterns was the only way leading to the maintenance of structural order within the painting.

The order present in the reliefs created by the artist since the 1950s led to the desired interpenetration of the inner - pictorial - space with the outer - real - space, i.e. to the creation of an ideal constructivist work. The unification of these realities became possible thanks to the recognition of the square form as the main element of painterly expression, which for Stażewski was the only natural and metaphysical shape that allowed for persistence and manifestation.

Initially white - testifying to the universality of the world, nature and art - squares began to multiply and take on colours differing only in their pigment, thus visualising the movement present in static objects. According to Stażewski, the art of the new world and the human being entering the epoch of contemporaneity should lead to an aesthetic moment ordered by the collective.