10 Questions with Iwo Zaniewski

Al-Tiba9 Art Magazine ISSUE12 | Featured Artist

Iwo Zaniewski is a painter, photographer, and creative director. After graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw in 1981, he moved to Spain and won the Grand Prix at the Joan Miró Foundation International Competition in Barcelona in 1984. Upon returning to Poland in the early 1990s, he founded an advertising agency and became a celebrated commercial director. Although Zaniewski works in various capacities, traditional oil painting lies at the heart of his creative practice. He has exhibited internationally, and his works are included in private and public collections in Europe, the USA, Mexico, China, and Japan. Thanks to social media and the growing interest from collectors, galleries, and magazines, his paintings have recently been rediscovered by the international public.

iwozaniewski.com | @iwozaniewski

ARTIST STATEMENT

Iwo Zaniewski works with traditional oil painting, drawing upon the history of figurative art and portraying subjects from everyday contemporary life. While his artworks depict narrated scenes, they are predominantly focused on formal internal relations and striving for equilibrium. To reach the state of perfect visual harmony – the artist’s ultimate goal – he has been constructing the paintings in a way that each element of the composition becomes irreplaceable support for the arrangement of the others. Together with a group of theoretical physicists, experimental psychologists, and neuroscience researchers, he even designed the Algorithm of Harmony, a concept illustrated by a mathematical formula.

While Zaniewski’s paintings do not reference specific geographic locations, some places are implicitly encoded through the symbolism of colours and the character of light. Although the juxtaposition of colours is often contrasting, their convergence is simultaneously soft, gentle, and devoid of deliberately provoked dissonance. The visual dialogues between forms, light, and layers of colour ultimately highlight the mood rather than the action of portrayed events.

***Chess Players***, oil on canvas, 81 x 116 cm, 2006 © Iwo Zaniewski

INTERVIEW

Please, introduce yourself to our readers. Who are you, and what do you do?

I'm a painter, photographer, and creative director. I work with traditional oil painting, drawing upon the history of figurative art and portraying subjects from everyday contemporary life. Although I depict narrated scenes, the main focus for me is on formal internal relations between paintings' elements. I've been engrossed in arranging them to allow the finished composition to come as close as possible to reaching the state of perfect visual harmony. I'm not trying to charm people by showcasing my personality as an artist. To be honest, all there is a rectangle covered in oil paint, creating a pleasant journey for the eye. That's all.

Tell us a bit about your background. You have worked as a creative director and also founded an advertising agency. How did you get interested in art, and when did you decide to start your career in this field?

The beginning of my creative work would be when I first started to look and see. I've been painting ever since I can remember. Other things I work with, like photography, film, and advertisement, started in the later stages of my life, but painting and composition have been there since early childhood.
I come from an artistic family, so I've always been surrounded by art. My father was an architect, my stepfather an art critic, and my mother, Xymena, was an acclaimed Polish scenographer, architect, and fashion designer. She authored stage design for five ballet films and created scenography for 35 classical theatrical and 15 opera performances. As a child, I often visited theatres, where my mother worked on costumes and scenography. Fascinating sketches and drawings, glistening decorations, and colourful materials were among the first things I saw in my life. That experience ignited my interest in colours and patterns, which constitute essential elements of my paintings to this day.
I graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, Poland, in 1981 and began an active career as an artist. In my twenties, I lived in-between Spain and Germany and won the Grand Prix at the Joan Miró Foundation International Competition in Barcelona in 1984. In the meantime, I was working on advertising projects, which started to consume more and more of my time. Upon returning to Warsaw, I became a commercial art director and founded my own advertising agency. However, I have never stopped painting and consider myself a painter. I paint nearly every single day.

***Skiers in Hotel I***, oil on canvas, 92 x 116 cm, 2006 © Iwo Zaniewski

***Woman on a Red Couch***, oil on canvas, 73 x 92 cm, 2004 © Iwo Zaniewski

What are your main goals when it comes to your art?

Visual harmony! It's been fascinating to me since the very beginning of my creative practice, and I've been studying it all my life. In 2018, I joined a team of aesthetics scholars, visual psychologists, and neuroscience researchers who conducted extensive theoretical and practical research into the mechanism governing this phenomenon, investigating the awareness of composition as the fundamental factor in perceiving beauty in art. The outcome, an 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. I believe that my means as a painter, above all the compositional principles, serve balance and harmony.

You work with paintings and traditional techniques, like oil paint. What does it represent for you? And why did you choose this medium over others?

I didn't really have a choice - you could say that oil painting chose me. In primary school, I came across a box of my parents' old oil paints in the attic and started to paint with them immediately. That same year, I got a package of professional Winsor & Newton oil paints for Christmas. I remember the first thing I painted then were church organs emerging from darkness. I chose that subject because I wanted the painting to depict a serious, cultural subject. Before that, I painted with crayons.
For me, oil paint represents the traditions and cultural heritage of the world. All painters from the 19th and 20th centuries whom I admire used oil paint. It is the medium that allows me to express myself best. Conventions of spreading the paint, how they combine, their intensity and sharpness, and the fact that applying them is so easy and smooth (in comparison to painting with acrylics, for instance) - all those things make it the best technique there is, in my opinion.

***Aquarium***, oil on canvas, 150 x 110 cm, 2007 © Iwo Zaniewski

Your works have almost no reference in geography, time period, or style, yet they seem easily recognizable and relatable. Where do you get your inspiration from?

As a creative director, I've got to travel a lot. I have visited nearly all continents throughout my life, and exploring them definitely influenced my artistic practice. Starting with Spain, where I used to live for two years, and then countries of Latin America and Africa, where I spent a significant amount of time, have had a big impact on my creative work. In my paintings, you can recognise some geographical locations, subtly encoded in the symbolism of the colours and the character of light.
Colour is something I'm deeply interested in. I believe it has its own intrinsic value. What fascinates me in paintings is the interplay of different elements and unconventional ways in which they affect one another, of which colour combinations, which we would never think of when it comes to clothes or interiors, play a significant role. Put together in the right way within a painting, they evoke powerful and distinct emotions that are rather impossible to express using other means.
I mostly take inspiration from my surroundings and everyday life and depict scenes representing conventional, daily scenarios — eating, reading, sitting, resting, conversing, playing, and painting. However, in the end, the visual dialogues between forms, light, and layers of colour highlight the mood rather than the action of portrayed events. As I mentioned before, my main goal is to achieve perfect compositional harmony, and that is something I've always been occupied by the most. It always comes first in my paintings.

You have a particular color palette, recurring themes, and composition preferences. What is your creative process like? Can you walk us through the realization of one of your works from start to finish?

My creative process is quite diversified. I rarely see a finished painting in my head straight away. A composition, as I understand it, requires an impeccable alignment of all elements. Not every introductory detail can be developed into a perfect visual arrangement. My mind and imagination practise themselves in constructing this first form, so it can become almost like a mould for my intuition to smoothly conjure up suggestions of all the other elements that can follow suit to create a coherent whole. Sometimes I start just with a splash of paint in the middle and continue from there. Those first few brushstrokes and capturing the first couple of visual elements are crucial for a composition. That's why it's the most challenging part of the creative process. It determines what will happen next and which other elements will be added to complete the painting. The first moves and introduced components might be random and created without much thought or planning, but what follows is well-considered and fits in - or aims to fit in - perfectly well. I always trust my instinct and believe that sometimes your hand already knows what you want to create, even before your imagination can process and comprehend it. Like it is led by your subconscious.
When it comes to the technical aspect of creating, there are many routes to the final outcome. For example, in the past, I used to begin by sketching a composition with crayons and later projecting it with an epidiascope on a big format canvas to continue with oil paints. Some time ago, I replaced my sketchbook with a tablet, a perfect device for a quick arrangement of elements for a composition before painting.

***6th Floor***, oil on canvas, 110 x 150 cm, 2020 © Iwo Zaniewski

***Night Email***, oil on canvas, 110 x 140 cm, 2008 © Iwo Zaniewski

Is there anything else you would like to experiment with?

I'm a bit tired of the ease of creating harmonious compositions. I try different things now. I am curious about what could surprise me in the painting process. I constantly experiment. For instance, I start a painting with an element that I would never begin with in the first place because it doesn't seem right or because it's not easy to build around it and complement it coherently. To feel the excitement and to astonish myself, I sometimes start by constructing forms which seem pointless. I fail a lot of times, but often end results are quite intriguing.

You already have a long and successful career. What is one piece of advice you would like to give to an emerging artist?

Suppose I was to advise artists interested in the formal, visual aspect of the painting (as opposed to context and topic). In that case, I'd tell emerging artists to always remember that what they create and present to the public is, ultimately, just a rectangle covered in paint. Their task is to use the paint and brush in a way that would result in an aesthetically pleasing composition. I often think of myself as a creator of interestingly smeared rectangles. That's liberating.

***Surfers At Night***, oil on canvas, 80 x 60 cm, 2022 © Iwo Zaniewski

And on the contrary, what is one thing you still have to master?

I constantly struggle with creating paintings that are too similar to one another, too alike. I try to break through and explore new territories to find something beyond my control that might lead to unexpected adventures in the visual realm. I want to create more abstractions, but every time I try, a composition ends up being either too realistic and, therefore, too much like my previous works or, on the contrary, it becomes too extreme and resembles a Picasso. I strive for balance.

Lastly, what are your plans for the future? Any new exciting projects or exhibitions?

I'm currently working on a new body of work in line with my latest explorations of abstraction. Recently, I've also developed an interest in AI technologies and what could be achieved with their support, especially with regard to my ongoing investigation of perfect visual harmony. There is definitely a huge potential there. Yet, what the human eye can see and what it can create seems to be unmatched. 'Algorithm of Harmony' – my investigations of that phenomenon, which I have conducted with neuroscience researchers – confirms that. I intend to experiment with AI more in the future and see if it could be bridged with my theory of harmonious compositions.

related interviews