Francizek Staroweiyski watched me with amusement as I struggled with the Polish spelling of the line he had just quoted from Dante's Inferno. He finally turned my interview notes around and printed neatly: "Come with me and I shall lead you to the wonders of a nonexistent place." It seemed as natural as if he were giving me his address.
I had come to Poland to interview this enfant terrible of the Polish art world. At fifty-nine, he is still referred to with that phrase--proof of his continuing capacity to shock the viewing public. But age and time are relative dimensions for him. Not the least of his idiosyncratic habits is that he subtracts three hundred years when dating his works, so that his current posters and paintings are signed as of 1689. This not only testifies to his love for the Baroque but suggests a defiant struggle with time. It is also, to be sure, an embrace of the past in a land robbed of its history. His work is a time capsule meant to confound its finders.
Warsaw seemed to be coated with more than its usual chalky grayness, not unlike the shade often favored by Starowieyski. But we were far from the city's grime in his suburban twelfth-floor studio, where strong daylight illuminated his famous collection of carved and scarred saints, cherubs, chalices, crucifixes, clocks, locks, and sabers--many sabers. It was as if one had entered a cathedral armory, an artist's reliquary, where time and place merged in studied disarray.
Starowieyski the painter, poster artist, stage designer, television producer, film actor (he portrayed Jacques-Louis David in Andrzej Wajda's Danton) was eager to tell me about his recent work. The enormous triptych titled Pilgrims with the Sacred Half-Horse was the culmination of a style he had described as "Theater of Drawing." The horse figure, while clearly derived from the centaur, was pure Starowieyski. Fascinated with depicting the human eye, he had replaced the centaur's human torso with an enormous, breastlike eyeball, whose bulbous shape was barely supported by the hind legs of a stallion. The quote from Dante that he had printed in my notebook at the start of the interview would be prominently displayed on the finished work.
While Starowieyski's work had already been described as theater in the 1960s, the latest "happening" was a culmination of important developments in his artistic life. Starting in the early 1980s, Starowieyski decided to involve the public in his work in a manner seldom contemplated by any painter.
"I wanted an audience," Starowieyski told me. "Perhaps no more than twenty to thirty people who would sit in front of me and watch me draw. They would have to agree to remain in the room for the whole day. I would choose a model or two and the rest could do anything they wanted to, except leave. They could eat, make love, they could ask questions about my work at any time. But they had to stay. Those who wanted to come just to have a look were not for me. I wanted people who were friendly, interested. I tried to avoid a circus atmosphere, but I felt that it was important for me to show an act of creation from the start. And of course I hoped they would return day after day and feel the excitement as the work progressed."
In working on the huge triptych, Starowieyski had actually stretched the canvas over the three walls of the room in front of his
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