A Hermit

SAINT MEN IN INDIA - SADHU - OWN NOTHING, offer nothing, but they perceive their inner reality. One cannot escape one's fate; our life is merely a vision. The moment when one's vision is revealed, is the essence of one's reality." These are the words by Szymon Urbański, a painter who has always followed his own individual path; in life and in art. His art has been uncompromising, fully devoted to his vision. This has never changed, however the world of values pursued by Szymon Urbański, the hermit painter, has changed. He has been gradually turning his flat into a specific piece of art. He has been filling it with small chapels and religious paintings. This is a hybrid type of approach to religion. One chapel can be a meeting place of the Mother of God, Buddha and John Paul II. What counts is the positive energy that is to create a good climate in the apartment, atelier, a solitary recluse, a retreat, but also a specifically understood chapel. Pictures are not religious yet, and it is likely that they will never be; merely attempting to criticize human faults, weaknesses, deviations. They are not beautiful, with a touch of a dissonance, extremely individual. Szymon Urbański thinks that his pictures are "medieval", and he names them such. Nevertheless, they owe most to the vanguard trends from the early 20th century. There are some traces of German expressionists; extreme in the message and palette. The forms represented on these canvases borrow a lot from Malevitch, Laryonov and other, less famous Russian vanguard artists. The pieces are strongly painted and striking in expression. They offer a specific, human and characters collection of curiosities; these figures seem to come out of a flee market or a folk theater. This is an absolutely unique painting, not to be compared with anything done today; it is not true even to itself. Its unbearable, painful honesty accounts for its impact.

Szymon Urbański, "Pictures", the Stairs Gallery, Warsaw, September 2009.