Andrzej Nowacki

Andrzej Nowacki was born on 15 October 1953 in Rabka, Poland. He spent his youth in Krakow. His first artistic experience was in interior design and art restoration. In 1977 he left Poland to study Scandinavian languages at the University of Gothengurg and later Art History in Innsbruck, Austria.
During the 1980s Nowacki opened to himself Polish constructivism. Henryk Stazewski's art had an influence on the early works of Nowacki. Since the 1990s Nowacki had collaborated with Heinz Teufel, a collector who owned one of the most prestigious art galleries for concrete art in Europe located in Cologne and later in Berlin.
• 1994 Andrzej received a private scholarship in West Orange, N.Y.
• 1997, 1998, 2000 and 2001 he participated in the workshops «Under the sign of Geometry» that was organized by Polish art critic Bozena Kowalska in Okuninka.
• 2001 he received a scholarship from the New York Pollock-Krasner Foundation.
• 2005 was his first exhibition in Osaka, Japan. Later, he spent a year in his studio at Anna Maria Island, Florida, USA, where he created reliefs for the Seth Jason Beitler Gallery in Miami.
• 2015 Nowacki moved to a new large-scale studio at the former industrial area in Ostrava Dolni Vitkovice. Here he started to create his multi-part and large-format reliefs.
Currently, Andrzej Nowacki lives and creates in Berlin, Germany.


The most important exhibitions are:
1994 Lederman Fine Art Gallery, New York, USA
2000 Galerie Heinz Teufel, Berlin, Niemcy • Germany
2005 KISSHO Fine Art Gallery, Osaka, Japany

2006 Seth Jason Beitler Gallery, Miami, USA
2008 Milan Dobeš Múzeum, Bratysława, Słowacja • Bratislava, Slowakei

2009 Muzeum Narodowe Szczecin, Polska • Nationalmuseum Stettin, Polen
2011 Concrete art (Sztuka konkretna), Państwowa Galeria Sztuki, Sopot, Polska • National Gallery of Art, Sopot, Poland

2017 Konkrete Anliegen. Sammlung Teufel, Kunstmuseum Stuttgart,
Niemcy • Germany

2017 "The magic of square", National Gallery of Art, Sopot, Poland

2019 Milan Dobes Museum "Mystery of a quarter"

And more then 50 other individual and group exhibition around the World.

Reference to the sources: Porta-Polonica

Relational Patterns by Hubertus Gaßner

Art emerges from art – this production aesthetic and art historical assumption, or perhaps we should better phrase it as a demand or belief by artists, has (with some restrictions, and taken with a grain of salt) undoubtedly been justified for the genesis of an individual work, but also for the development of an artistic movements or the style of an entire epochs. For a history of forms and colors cannot be imagined without the expressive desire or even the expressive demand of the artists, different in each epoch. This is true even for movements articulating anti-subjective and anti-expressive approaches such as the constructivism of the 1920s and 1930s as well as the Op Art, the Minimal Art, or the Primary Structures of the geometric color field painting of the 1960s and 1970s.
Thus Andrzej Nowacki's œuvre not only unfolds in dialogue and in confrontation with its predecessors and models, his works series also consistently build on one another. His artistic biography begins in the year 1984, when he decided to dedicate his life entirely to painting. His first creative period was dominated by the doyen of Geometric Abstraction in Poland, the painter Henryk Stażewski, whom Nowacki visited in Warsaw in 1981 and 1982, shortly before he decided to follow the path of artistic creation. After first attempts at constructivist painting, accompanied by drawings and pastels, he experimented for the first time, in 1988, with the sculptural form of the relief, which to this day, remain the artist's decisive and exclusive medium, next to his drawing diaries. Like Stażewski, in the 1980s, the artist composed his strong-colored reliefs mainly from squares, rectilinear bars and empty frames, as well as circular discs and cylindrical shapes. As with his model, these geometric elements are mounted on a colorfully painted ground, but they create, in contrast to Stażewski's balanced compositions, the notion of violent dynamic movements by means of asymmetrical displacements of the geometrical picture elements: by their arrangement along rising or falling diagonals; seemingly rolling discs; cut or tipped squares; by the breaking or trimming the the squared frame; by ascending or descending rows of right-angled picture elements; and by the strong contrasts between intense shades of color.
Since 1995 color has assumed the leading role as a means of expression. Here too the Polish roots of the artist remain recognizable: a lyrical emotionality, so characteristic of the emotional life and the imagination of the Slavs, gives the color chords in major or minor their unmistakable muted mood, which can deepen melancholy or heighten euphoria; a rich warm red, orange or yellow can place glowing accents upon darker shades of the cold colors.
In 1998, Nowacki intensively studied the works of artists like Max Bill and Josef Albers. Above all, he devoted himself to the pictures of Antonio Calderara and Bridget Riley. The first reliefs, resulting from this engagement with the Italian and British painters, have come into being since the turn of the millennium and feature predominantly vertical compositions of rhythmic rows of vertical stripes, while the square fields and rectangular frames, which had hitherto dominated, are minimized both in their number and in extent. The explosive dynamics of the earlier compositions are soothed, and in place of visual tales of the turmoil and adventures of the squares and circles, we find symmetrically composed images of iconic statuary and a seemingly classical balance, in which every slightest deviation from the dominant symmetry, are balanced through form and color values. One recalls the balanced compositions in late Suprematism of Malewitsch and Ilja Tschaschnik, who in the 1920s, after a vivid phase of geometric abstraction, found a new calmness and simplicity through the symmetry and the reduction of the variety of forms. For the two Russians icon painting and a search for spiritual expression was the impetus for this reorientation.
To this day, the square remains for Nowacki the obligatory form for the surface of his reliefs. Their external standard dimensions, through 2005, are 45 x 45 cm or 90 x 90 cm, and thereafter 64 x 64 cm, 99 x 99 cm or 100 x 100 cm. Since the end of the 1990s, the reliefs have only worked with the vertical line of the stripe and the square, which are aligned exactly parallel to the outer edges of the surface and there is no longer any oblique or tipping movement. This creates an open framework of explicitly vertical and implicitly horizontal lines, configurations with infinite possibilities for variation that are as complex as they are evident and, despite their clarity and transparency in structure, preserve a mystery which is difficult to comprehend rationally. But emotionally, the more powerful correspondences and contrasts between the colors, as well as the slight deviations from the symmetrical basic forms, the tense relationship between open and closed, the confined and endlessly striving forms - visual relational patterns, appeal to our feelings, since they find resonance in our own life experience.
The formal relationships in the pictorial reliefs of the 1990s, which are based on strong formal tensions and vigorous expressions of movement, seem to have been replaced by composure; efforts to simplify the image elements of the stripe and square, as well as the collection and balancing of the forces, are now in the foreground. In 2000, Nowacki introduces a further composition factor into his reliefs, which brings additional calmness to the image field and focuses the path of movement of the color forms (which have previously been directed towards many sides) to a reference point from which the optically evoked movements propagate in a wavy manner towards both sides: the vertical mid-axis of the square composition around which all the pictorial elements are arranged in an axis-symmetrical manner. The uniform alignment of all the pictorial elements at perpendicular bisector in the center and the vertical boundaries of the panel is almost contemplative. Nevertheless, the motion evoked in the pictorial field remains unmistakable, even if it now acts more like an inner vibration of the vertical striped fields or is perceived by color-forms floating in space. Movement also suggests the alternating impression between a horizontal spreading and contraction of the vertical lines, which is reminiscent of the rhythmic alternation of systole and diastole of the pulsating heart. Striped and graduated color gradients also evoke the idea of moving from right to left or from left to right – usually in axis-symmetrical reflection.
The calming of the formerly vigorous movement and the reduction of the formal elements to the square field and the vertical line in the form of wooden strips, is also accompanied by a limitation of the color palette; the large, monochrome and intensely luminous color surfaces, characteristic of the reliefs of the 1980s and 1990s are replaced step by step by the vertically arranged wooden strips as color carriers, their three visible sides are usually painted in three different colors. Instead of the circular discs and rectangles, which were saturated by color, there are narrow ridges, on which the color retains its luminous power, but can scarcely spread over the surface. And one step further, after the turn of the millennium, we can look at pure striped pictures, which no longer have any colored surface forms. Even the colored surface of the picture becomes visible to the eye only as small segmented stripes of color – as intervals between the strips.
As this further development of Andrzej Nowacki's formal vocabulary and color composition has been markedly influenced by the striped pictures which the English painter Bridget Riley has created since 1980, let a comparison with her work be allowed here in order to make the idiosyncrasies of the striped reliefs more comprehensible. But it would be a misunderstanding to associate these large-format paintings with their rhythmic sequences of intensely-colored stripes as the so-called Op Art, this label does not really apply to Nowacki's striped reliefs. For both bodies of striped works are equally distant from the optically aggressive paintings and reliefs of Op Art, which are not only confusing, but also painful for the eye of the beholder. The overexertion of seeing through the stimulation of physiologically induced misperceptions on the human eye, as was the goal of Op Art, including the early pictures of Riley, is simply not the case in her later striped painting, nor is it in Nowacki's reliefs. Neither do they intend to provoke the physiological-visual responses of the human perception mechanism, nor do they overwhelm seeing through their striped compositions. Nor do they exclude psychological or better atmospheric associations and reactions of the viewers, in contrast to the programmatic restriction of the Op Artists who aimed at pure visual perception without any cognitive or emotional blending. Instead of subjective and symbolic signs, they demanded a pictorial programming, proceeding according to rational rules, which should be accessible to everyone, including the layman, by means of pure visual observation, requiring no previous knowledge and no explanation.
Further affinity can be found. In the late 1970s, Bridget Riley opted for the exclusive use of vertical bands of color, while Andrzej Nowacki made this radical decision for his work a few years after the turn of the millennium, and the most recent versions are shown in this exhibition. Both artists have reduced their formal repertoire to vertical stripes of the same width in a parallel arrangement, entirely covering the canvas or wooden panel. These narrow bands support a limited number of colors, the selection of which has a certain consistency within the individual groups of works, and can alter the degree of saturation, the refraction of their luminosity, and their opacity from painting to painting, or relief to relief, but never within a single work, whose colors always remain homogeneous. Just as Riley chooses from four to a maximum of seven different colors for a picture, Nowacki has, since about 2000, also used a comparable number of colors in his reliefs. Usually we count more than 100 such stripes. Similarly, the two artists also bundle their colors into subgroups of two to three colors, these bundles are repeated in horizontal rows, until another two-tone or three-tone group replaces them.
For both artists, we also find, in addition to exact verticals, stripes of color which are placed slightly obliquely on to the picture surface, which in both cases can modify the exact vertical to appear wavy: these waves are more angular in Nowacki due to the use of wooden strips, while in Riley they bend in soft curves. Arrayed on the surface of the reliefs, these wavy stripes give the impression of soft transitions – a sfumato, which, like a veil, lays itself over the strict rhythm of the rows of strips, underpinning them and intoxicating the eye. With all the formal strictness and repetition of the basic structure, a second optical order comes into play, which deals with the same pictorial elements, but only move their direction minimally from the vertical axis. The multiple repetition of this scarcely perceptible deviation from the vertical scheme underlays the strict rhythm of the vertical graduations with a softer melody.
Apart from this kinship in the all-over structure of the vertical stripe works of both artists, there are, however, also decisive differences which are not only due to the difference between painting and relief, but are also based on the different conception and handling of the relation between color and structure; in the different treatment of the material and the production process; and in the respectively unique semantics of the abstract fields of color, which only appear to be exclusively irritating to the optical nerve.
By reducing its image structure to vertical stripes of one to two centimeters in width, Riley creates a radical homogeneity and redundancy of form, which directs the attention of the viewer all the more to the colors. This homogeneous structure of the striped series simplifies the form of the picture composition of her paintings so consistently that one could speak of a liberation of color not only from all representational references, but also from all formal references. Color has finally emancipated itself from drawing (Disegno) to lead its own autonomous life. The "simple variable perceptions of color is the theme, in a deliberate, increasingly pursued distance from the object, and so also from the concreteness of the composition, which has to serve the diminishing hierarchization of its elements, in order to counteract any cognitive vision. Instead of a recognizable vision based primarily on Chiaroscuro values, we have the immediate visual effect of pure color energies and, consequently, a colored vision."
Andrzej Nowacki has not gone so far. Although he has also departed from all references to representation, the concreteness of the composition also plays an important role in his striped reliefs. The strips and the intervals between them are always painted in such a way that they are distinguishable from one another through the line fields which and are contrasted by color within the square panel. In any case, the principle of composition is retained, since these internal fields are placed into formal and color-oriented relationships to one another. There is still a top and bottom, and thus the sensation of gravity, which appeals to our bodily and objective sensations, as well as a right and left side in the picture, which is distinguishable in form and color. The two sides are always accentuated in the reliefs, as their vertical axis is always emphasized by the arrangement of the shapes and colors - an accentuation which can not be found in Riley's case, and indeed is deliberately excluded by her. Thus, she also avoids any horizontal line, which reminds one of natural forms such as the horizon in a landscape, while in numerous groups of reliefs by Nowacki indirect or imaginary horizontal lines can be perceived. They arise where vertically applied striped fields, by means of the colors of their strips, or by their mutually offset rows, become optically independent of horizontal bands, which are staggered one above the other, for example, in recent works such as Composition with Black, 18.11.15 (p. XX), Composition with B. 04.12.15 (p. XX), Composition with Red, 27.8.16 (p. XX) and Composition with White 18.10.16 (p. XX).
Through these references to the body of the observer and to the world external from the picture (e.g. the landscape) Nowacki's striped works are characterized by a much higher degree of sensuality compared to the Riley's paintings. This impression is, of course, also reinforced by the three-dimensional physicality and tangible physical weight of the wooden reliefs as well as by the handling of the material, which does not erase the traces of manual work in the creation of the wooden panels.
Rileys revisions of color tones from all external associations of perceptions also belongs to her work's renunciation of any 'painterliness'; indeed any individual handwriting of the artist is practically excluded as her pictures are as technically perfect as possible and are executed by assistants, so that no brush stroke can be seen, something which could otherwise distract from the sole perception of the colors and their interdependencies. Compared with this sublimation of bodily sensation, the wood reliefs are like pure nature. Although fully painted, the heaviness, the warmth and the organic nature of the material remain visible and perceptible. Additionally, the applied color, due to its strong pigment content, dull surfaces and high degree of saturation, also acts as a material substance, which appeals to the tactile as well as visual. The subtle colored paintwork of the built-up reliefs emphasizes their physicality and materiality; color and material form, as it were, the antipode to Riley's "elimination of the artist's handwriting for the complete cleansing of the 'seen' from every created artwork," which could "divert attention from pure color perception." Katarina Türr has correctly pointed out the polarity between her denaturalized structure and the "intended image effect", which "aims at a paranaturalist color perception of the entire picture." “ For, contrary to the limitation of Op Art and other forms of geometric abstraction, Riley is little interested in the reduction of the effect of her pictures on pure vision, consciously eliminating all associations which might refer to the emotional world of the observer, body sensations, or natural phenomena. Thus, the painter often gives her striped paintings titles which create a relationship between the works and atmospheric impressions in nature – associations that can only be triggered by the viewer through the chosen color combinations. Even though Andrzej Nowacki has not, since 1996, used comparably poetic or narrative titles, his striped reliefs – perhaps even more than Riley's similar works – allow for such associations. Indeed, they stimulate ideas and sensations that go far beyond a purely visual experience. The area of association that they open up is not so much the perception of moods, which are triggered by natural phenomena, as well as the phenomena of nature, but the complex realm of interpersonal relationships. To point to this subliminal theme, the artist has in recent years given titles to some of his work groups and individual reliefs, which indicate such patterns of relationship in the formal as well as in the transposed sense of intersubjective relations. While Lyrische Komposition 22.05.16 (p. XX) is conceived as a one-part work, in which a tryptich is examined for its correspondences and contrasts, and its harmonies and conflicts, the dyptichs e.g. Neue unsymmetrische Komposition 17.06.16 (p. XX), Neue Komposition 05.05.16 (S. XX) and Unsymmetrische Komposition I 25./26.12.15 (p. XX) emphasize interpersonal relations as their real theme. In particular, the nine-part composition Komposition neu zusammengestellt 14.06.16 (S. XX) makes clear how much energy this relationship work will require in an artistic and interpersonal sense, the complexity of the relationship, and how much communicative and emotional effort will flow into it, in order to merge such a manifold constellation into harmonious interplay.
The Wohl stabile Komposition 20.02.16 (p. XX) already indicates in the title the doubt that the harmony and happy interaction can ever be guaranteed or lasting. They have to be won again and again – in art as in life. The adjectives used in the titles mentioned refer to this inevitable necessity for constant renewal, but above all to the pictorial structure and the color scheme. The rhythmic movement and the oscillation of the colors and individual forms between clarity and ambiguity, as well as between precision and obscuration, show every momentary perception of the reliefs as a transitory one, as a visually mediated impression, which at the same time is stable and precarious. It seems as if this ephemeral impression could change at any moment, and each temporarily visible color-form constellation actually does change if the observer moves her spatial position in front of the reliefs. The sculptural strips, which completely cover the image field, always have a different color on each of their three sides, so that as the viewer moves in front of the picture, a previously hidden side of color becomes visible and a formerly visible one disappears. With all the stability of the built pictures and their balanced compositions, these reliefs always convey a fleetingness and transience of momentary appearance, triggering the sensation that what seems so harmonious, successful and secure at the moment can barely be held and preserved. Here, too, a melancholy tone prevails. The coloring of many works also reminds us of a last glow in the evening when the dark shadows of night begin to spread over the world. The association with fiery autumn leaves in dark forests is also not too distant from some color compositions 'in minor'.
One would err in the assumption that the effect of the works is imparted to the viewer more intensely when it is presented more expressively. The intensity in art does not necessarily arise from expressivity. In his book Abstraktion und Einfühlung (Abstraction and Empathy), published in 1908, the art historian Wilhelm Worringer explained why the abstract geometric style was at the origin of all visual expressions of mankind, in other words: "from which psychic roots this unconditional inclination to the dead inorganic line, and towards the abstraction of life and principles can be explained". According to the author, the historical "starting-point of the artistic process" is not in the imitation of the visible reality in figurative representations, but in " the linear abstraction, which is certainly connected to nature as a model, but which has nothing to do with any imitative tendencies." Worringer included imitative tendencies under the concept of empathy within the representational perception of reality.
"To the linear inorganic, every empathy repels the first beginnings of aesthetic need," which is why the "geometrical style was the first artistic style." To his surprise, the art historian realized, in retrospect, that this style of geometric abstraction came once again into fruition with the new abstract art from the same period, around 1910, in which he wrote and published his treatise on the origins of the artistic design. In the subtitle, he called his investigation a contribution to stylistic psychology, because he sought a psychological justification in which "respective mental states of the peoples concerned [...] lead their artistic needs to the linear-inorganic abstraction." For the beginnings of geometric abstraction in the prehistory of man, he knew to give motivations using a psychological argumentation: "What are the psychical presuppositions of the impulse towards abstraction? We have to look for them in the world-feeling of each people, in their psychical attitude towards the cosmos. The 'abstraction impulse' is the consequence of a great inner disturbance of man through the phenomena of the outer world and corresponds in a religious relationship to a strongly transcendental belief. This state we would call an immense spiritual dread of space. When Tibull says: "primum in mundo fecit deus timor, this same feeling of anxiety can also be assumed as the root of artistic creation," at the beginning of which we find geometrical abstraction.
Kandinsky and the other painters of the Blaue Reiter were glad to make use of Worringer's argumentation as they set out to create a fundamental new beginning for abstract art and sought to legitimize it theoretically. Kandinsky's first abstract paintings and watercolors, which, in the years before the First World War, repeatedly evoke the Apocalypse, testify to the "feelings of angst", which not only Worringer saw in the prehistory of man. Even for later generations of abstract artists, Worringer's justification for abstraction was a confirmation of their own actions, and with regard to the more than 30-year artistic practice of Andrzej Nowacki, Worringerer's reflections seem plausible to me when referring to the psychical motives and semantic content of his works.
The year 1984 marks the beginning of his artistic activity; he says in retrospect: "I was afraid. [...] This is how the 'Angst' cycle came about, and I came upon Munch. And to the ability to consolidate and master one's own fear. Angst cannot be abolished, but one can try to name it. One gains the upper hand and looks into the eyes of one's own fear." The reliefs of the artist are, therefore, not the expression of this Lebensangst, but, on the contrary, the expression of their processing and, at the very least, the momentary mastery of the creative act. For angst comes from an inner emotional chaos. Even more intensively for him, the fear of a "vast, unrelated and confusing world of epiphany," of which Worringer speaks in terms of a chaotic, impenetrable, and therefore menacing the external world. In view of this motivation of the psychological conditions of geometric abstraction from a feeling of existential anxiety, it is hardly surprising that the basic formal characteristics, with which Worringer characterizes this original style of artistic creation, follow the same design principles with which Nowacki composes his reliefs. Worringer has four basic design factors: line, flatness (understood as the avoidance of space), symmetry and rhythm. Added to this, in Nowacki's case, is color, which, for him, plays a decisive role.
Worringer derives the primacy of the straight line and of the flatness from a "dread of space", which in turn is caused by a feeling of angst: "So we propose: the simple line and its development in a purely geometrical regularity had to be determined by the ambiguity and confusion of the phenomena to offer the most troubled people the greatest opportunity for happiness. For here the last remnant of living conditions and dependency have been eradicated, here the highest absolute form, the purest abstraction is achieved; Here is law and necessity, where otherwise the arbitrariness of the organic reigns over all. The same angst-filled relationship with the external world is also the cause of a "strict suppression of the representation of space," "because it is exactly space that connects things and gives them their relativity within a worldview." On the other hand, it is the "primordial need of man to free the sensual object by means of the artistic representation from the ambiguity of its three-dimensionality" and relation to space. The form of the square, which is self-contained and complete, because it is symmetrical in all directions, is a form representing the highest degree of clarity, which is defined as a "single form resolved from space" freed from all "ambiguity and confusion within the phenomenon in space" with its perspectival distortions, and thus heterogeneous views of one and the same object. This self-contained autonomy of the square seems to me the real reason why the artist has chosen this form as the format for all his reliefs.
On this square basic form, the reliefs unfold the horizontal arrangement of the colorfully painted strips, in the highest possible variety of rhythms, wherein the rhythmic sequence of verticals is practically always grouped around one, two or three axes of symmetry – which sometimes appear stronger, sometimes more subdued. In accordance with this finding, in abstraction and empathy: "According to the highest laws of symmetry and rhythm, the strictly constructed geometrical style is, from the point of view of law, the most perfect." The "most beautiful goal" of this geometric style is, however, the creation of "tranquility in movement," a dialectics that is most perfectly embodied in the work of art as a "living rhythm or rhythmic liveliness into which our feeling of vitality can enwrap all our happiness." I have already written in detail elsewhere on the central importance of the rhythm in the works of Nowacki, but to put it briefly: "Andrzej Nowacki's reliefs from the last few years are based on two basic symmetrical structures: axial point symmetry and group symmetry created by frictional patterns. These two types of symmetry evoke different rhythmic sensations in the viewer. Bipolar rhythm develops with elements that expand repetitively in both directions from a central point or axis. Serial rhythm creates a vibrating form that progresses from right to left or left to right with alternating lines and intervals. The use of color fleshes out these two rhythmic patterns with a major or minor key, melody, mood and emotional depth. In other words, color provides the life and sparkle. Without this alternating system, this consonance and dissonance of colours, the rhythmic fields in the reliefs would be nothing more than cold geometric structures. It is the combination of complex rhythmic patterns and pulsating color that produces the rich sensations and emotions which we experience when viewing picture surfaces that appear to vibrate"
I do not want to discuss here whether Worringer correctly describes the first forms of human artistic activity, or whether he gives the historically adequate reasons for their geometric abstract forms, resulting from feelings of angst. His description and psycho-historical explanation of geometric abstraction serve merely as an explanatory model for the connection between the structure and color of Nowacki's reliefs on the one hand and their semantics on the other – a quality of expression and significance in the works that apply not only to the beginnings of Andrzej Nowacki's artistic activity, but to his present work. The recent return to descriptive titles confirms this significance and expressiveness of what is only at the first glance purely formal compositions. As the artist elucidated last year: "The geometric and calculatedly rhythmic and ordered structure of the reliefs with their strips and intervals give me a sense of psychological and emotional security. If I only had a canvas in front of me, lacking any material resistance, I would explode. Geometric, mathematical and symmetrical order is a backbone for me. Only when I have fixed the dimensions and the proportions of the structure as well as the corresponding relationships of the forms in the material, am I free to let the color, that is the emotion, flow. The mathematically precise, calculated number of strips and intervals, their dimensions and symmetrical groupings, are like safety belts while driving on the highway at 300 km/h."
Jean-François Lyotard, the philosopher of Postmodernism, stated in his essay "Painting as a Libidinal Set-Up" (published in French in 1973 and in German in 1980, remark by the translator) that the art of today is no longer a representation or criticism in the conventional sense but a transformer of energy deployments, which is the only collective standard for producing intensive effects. In this sense, the color reliefs that Nowacki always wanted to be understood as painting, represent nothing in the sense of Worringer's concept of empathy. They are a complex and dynamic kind of visual content freed for the viewer from all objective representation, who on closer inspection, however, will learn to discover within them a "playing surface for libidinal intensities, affects, passions." In the harmonious interplay of polar phenomena: structure and color, rhythmically flowing movement and strict symmetry, physical materiality and immaterial intensity, angst and euphoria, we experience in Andrzej Nowacki's artistic work (to use a beautiful, old-fashioned word from the art psychologist Theodor Lipps) "Beglückungswert“ (or the value of joy) . Or, as Wilhelm Worringer expressed it, in which "peoples" would be replaced by the "artist": "The value of a work of art, what we call its beauty, lies generally in its "values of happiness" ("Beglückungswerten"). This ‘value of happiness', of course, is in a causal relationship to the psychological needs that they satisfy. [...] Tormented by the confused context and the interplay of the external world phenomena, such peoples had a tremendous need for rest. The possibility of happiness which they sought in art was not to enwrap themselves in the external world, or in themselves, but to extract the single thing out of the external world and its arbitrariness and randomness, to eternalize it by approaching abstract forms, and in this way to find an escape in the contemplation of phenomena." As such a 'single thing' we should look at each of the artist's reliefs and let them increase the value of our happiness.

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