Beksiński i źródła wyobraźni

This article refers to a “fantastic” period in Zdzisław Beksiński’s painting (1929-2005). The quest for the sources of imagination of this original Polish artist has a broad cultural background. Its horizons are marked by Marcel Brion and Roger Caillois’s research on fantasy as well as G. R. Hocke’s assertion regarding the epoch of mannerism. Taking the above into consideration, it can be stated that imagination has an achronological character and in the case of the herein described painter it was a determinant of his aesthetic style and artistic attitude. His specific creative technique involved breaking with the order of reality, bordering on a dream and using the mannerist-like rhetorical figures. Beksiński’s “fantastic realism” was based on oneiric visions transferred into small drawing sketches. Their range encompassed unconscious elements, dream and nightmare iconography and a-logical narrative structures, which the artist complemented, added nuances and subsequently developed while working on his paintings. Specific motifs, forms and palette of colours and matter encroach on the presence of those primary visions – the authentic “pictures form under eyelids”. However, their anteriority in the act of creation was indisputable. They carried a special meaning for Beksiński by summarising intense sensations derived from reality and dreams, he could, just for a moment, project himself beyond the material world and the reigning of the passing time.