I remember the first time I saw a group of Eugeniusz Gerlach’s works in his studio in Krakow: I saw and heard some great masters: Cézanne, Gauguin, Monet, Matisse, Miró, Picasso, Chopin, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms… The fifty-years-long discourse with the giants of painting and music the artist has been involved in is fascinating and everlasting in his oeuvre.
It all started in a secondary school of visual arts in Wrocław, where Eugeniusz Gerlach’s teachers were graduates of the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow, former students of Wojciech Weiss and Zbigniew Pronaszko. Later, when he himself signed up for the Academy, he met professors such as Wacław Taranczewski, Jerzy Nowosielski, Hanna Rudzka-Cybisowa, Czesław Rzepiński, Jonasz Stern.
Through his painting, Eugeniusz Gerlach gives us a better understanding of great masters and, through them, helps comprehend the world we live in. He confesses: “When I stand before the white surface of canvas, I get overwhelmed by a unique state of spirit, and an awareness of starting a mystery that is sparked off by the first patch I lay. Then there is silence, loneliness and time that flows slowly. The subject is there, the first outlines of the composition appear; next are the color, rhythm, hues, and distinctive contours, which are very important for me as they bring order to the painterly world. There are emotions, too. All that transforms the white surface of canvas into a work that vibrates with an extravaganza of color that begins to live its own life”. His perfect sense of color, the dynamics and form organized by black contours are surely the elements that make it hard for our imagination to leave Eugeniusz Gerlach’s painted world behind.
Czesław Czapliński
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