Convention accepted by Witold Popiel was given many names, different in particular circles representing different perception. Witold Popiel wrote: ‘maybe my naïveté put me in trouble, but because there was even a Chinese school of smelling paintings, I didn’t lose my heart and persistently made my way to the aim’. It is worth a mention, that before critics decided to make definition of fantastic realism (very often taking fantasy for fiction, claiming that vision is not a real thing and that synergy is only a coincidental effect of synchrony or diachrony), this aim was beyond the canon of preferences and likes dominating in the society. Of course knowledge and literature on this subject is very helpful, nonetheless creating things that haven’t been described we are moving towards the core of the meaning, even if we still don’t know their role or function.
Witold Popiel, seeking arche for his paintings, has on his way a partner in music, from which first emerged bimorphous worlds and then all fantastic realism of characters and creatures submerged in dreamy atmosphere, as if they were going back to their beginning, where in the act of creation the creator is the only part in the dialogue, which becomes meditation, like attempt to answer questions that haven’t been asked.
Fantastic realism is different from realism of dreams. It’s worth remembering when we look at paintings that in the meantime were given as examples of ‘modernism’, ‘futurism’, ‘classicism’ and ‘surrealism’. They were said to illustrate unrealistic world of fairy-tales, close but strange, indistinct but personal – magical and metaphysical. Magic was covering technique and method of painting and aesthetics was hidden behind metaphysics. Knowledge on interdependence of vibrations was in its infancy and didn’t go beyond the threshold of ateliers and workshops. Resonance, most of the time illusive, was caused by the pressure of the world created by generations of suffering people, trying to damp sparks of life staying beyond their needs.
‘Decision to make new attempts to confine energy of meditation in frame of a painting, or rather in particular colours and shapes, developed sensitivity, attention and caution. I didn’t want to frighten away the music and preceding sounds’ – wrote about his experiments Witold Popiel. ‘At first all was going smoothly but in one unguarded moment sounds disappeared in the painting which, unrolled like a carpet, revealed new fragments of design covering trace of the music’.
‘I listen to the music with attention and tried – to make it more understandable – to keep vibrations of particular sounds. But how can I fill in a canvas with signs, if music doesn’t bring any concrete metaphors, only their foundations. Music created its own world and I find no explanation how it happened. And the painting remained as silent as the grave. After so many experiments and attempts I made to reconstruct the sound and rhythm I still seemed to be incapable to do it’.
In that time arts like jazz, painting, poetry and theatre – they all were in crisis. Inspiration and art were treated as separate phenomena. Inspiration was a thing itself and had nothing to do with the life of artist. Dominating point of view was that art is a separate field and category as real as the truth and the good.
Witold Popiel wrote then: ‘One day, I think it was a crucial moment, I left music to musicians and kept painting to myself’. What seemed to be a research, with all this preceding meditation, intention and reflection, not only was transformed - thanks to our extended perception - in metaphor but also became inspiration for dreams and fantasies, sometimes even for a plot of a story.
Although I can’t believe that it’s possible to create one system of coexisting phenomena and forms and that only few people can meet them and experience their presence, I more and more often think that art stamps these areas where is experienced by something else than senses.
PS
Figurative arts belong to that kind of knowledge, which one not only has to accept and believe in, but also experience themselves and build up with all that excess of meanings, usually attributed to something else. It refers also to the painting art, which is so obvious that seems to simply illustrate the world of our feelings, thoughts, impressions and emotions. And so it is when we deal with art. And happens, because it may happen, that we face the art of painting. And from this moment on everything is different. Consciousness and perception change and mind cannot stay put in existing frame.
The need for research and consciousness that we are not the only ones to feel this need might have been the reason why Witold Popiel abandoned jazz for traditionally fantastic painting. Music has remained the adventure of my life. Sometimes it’s just fun, sometimes fantastic world, like this from Witold’s paintings. What is interesting, I have never found an illustration to my music among them.
But this, what we call a phonosphere of the past age and old times, Witold Popiel has depicted with true likeness. Maybe he doesn’t even know about that? But maybe I am mistaken? I was in theatre, when he was painting. And long after that I realised that figurative arts belong to the same group. But before, one art was as far from the other as the day from the night and the cosmos from the chaos. Everything was coming to an end and hardly anything became classic – only a legend or myth. Or a mystery transferred in the future. Fairy-tale and fantasy, sung at a bed-time in forgotten language with unknown melody...
Sławomir Gołaszewski
Witold Popiel, "The Way of the Artist", author: Max Kluge
"Paintings of Witold Popiel ", author: Jarosław Markiewicz