Aqualung

Excerpt from an interview with the artist

Reporter: Well, yes, but nowadays, when we have computers at our disposal, almost perfect printing, this is prehistory. Such an anachronism. We don’t have to polish the stone, we have modern printers.

Piotr Panasiewicz: Except that it is not the same. It’s like driving an alpha romeo spider from the 1970s down the road. You feel every breath of this car. Every touch of the gas, the opening of the throttle, the air wheezing in the engine, the rasp of the gearbox, the wooden steering wheel. In a modern car you are all encased in plastic and hear nothing. Of course there is comfort, quality. I rather appreciate what is closer to a person. Lithography, despite appearances, is unmistakable. Because the same works printed digitally and from stone, however, there is a difference. For me, huge. I treat lithography as a kind of painting. Of the graphic techniques, this is the form closest to painting. She transfers all these painterly feelings to stone. Lithography was also highly regarded by painters. It was cultivated by Renoir, Matisse, Munch, Chagall, Picasso, Toulouse-Lautrec. And of the Poles, for example, Wyspianski or Wyczółkowski. Letters by Karol Frycz, a painter and prominent stage designer, have survived in which he wrote that lithography set him painting. Lithography makes it so that you have to limit the number of colors. Of course, mixing them gives further colors. But handling basic colors teaches that sometimes sparing art and focusing on form, teaches a new perspective. Wyczółkowski wrote that for him lithography was a very valuable stimulus.