The Moment

It is hard for me to write about my own works keeping distance and the objectivity at the same time. So I realize that what you will read can be completely different from it, what really you will be thinking about them.

I am a bit of a surrealist, a bit of a portrait painter and something even more unspecified in what I do. Very man, as the topic, has always interested, however I am trying to determine this only moment, in which it alone is the most apart from the entire uniqueness of human character still with oneself, is revealing the uncontrollable inner life for his personality living in the very moment most intensively. It can be the moment of creating, the moment of staying in some surroundings, whether finally savouring one's body. Hedonism and the humility, distance and the closeness, everything it is making the image of the man up. Surreal World is being craved very much here, he is heightening the word through the unlimited amount of solutions, often surprising.

This "moment" has been accompanying me for ages in my works. Beginning the adventure with the drawing from normal painting portraits of people, through desire for expressing something more, to the attempt to show the entire complexity of situation, in the end till the shift techniques not to say fields of art established me. I mean stained glass in which I have only recently started being found which having the limitation with unique technology is causing that the form is becoming even more literal and strong.

Here are a few words about my art. I'm counting on constructive criticism....

The rest of them you can see on my website: www.gador.eu

Maciej Gador

The Anti-Vice Campaign

I discovered these exquisite pieces by Zhang Haiying on the Saatchi website.
My first impression, which I shared on the previous post, was one of formal sublimity. Without the context of these other pieces I didn't at first see the "meta text" behind the work and assumed they were "merely" formal studies in virtuosity. (I say merely with a grain of salt).

However, as one discovers each piece in the series, a greater dialogue begins to unfold. There is a current of Nietzsche's moral relativism flowing through this painter from China. He speaks of a puritan desire for morality in a religious vacuum. He reveals the tensions of globalization, the colonialist insertion of western culture in a land where history and antiquity was once erased by western ideology. He describes the yearning for cultural context, the adoption of western virtues and vice and the simultaneous forces that oppress it.

As a discussion of the Chinese sex trade and the inadvertent arrests of innocent women as well, these works blur the line between virtue and vice and even alternate them at times. They compare and contrast the glamorous and self-destructive night life with the puritan power of the communist government. They refrain from specific judgement but don't shy from vigorous inquiry.

"What is the will to power"?
"What is the value of individual freedom"?
"Does the equality of individual power leave us vulnerable to absolute power"?


They converse in an international language intelligible to every tongue because each of us has experienced something similar: the cultural and social void, the bullet train of world change, and the slow extinction of bio-cultural diversity.

Zhang Haiying

It is my belief that the formal language of painting should convey the content of the piece. But when friends of mine who have not education in art see a painting, they see the subject. To them the subject is dominant and the formal language is secondary. From my perspective it is the opposite.

The piece above speaks to me about the artist. The bravado of his brush strokes and mastery of tone. The language of the brush is seductive, but the limited content of the subject fails to take the piece further.

In New York there is an overwhelming amount of "content" in the subject of the art, but most artists here show absolutely no concern for the formal language of the work. For me, this work is largly inaccessable. It does not compel me to consider its meaning. So, what I'm getting at is, can a piece stand alone simply on its formal qualities or its conceptual qualities alone?

Creative Solutions

Our new blog Sustainable Art seeks to find ecological, economical, and creative solutions to climate change and other problems endangering our planet (and our species).

We think that art, from its message down to the process of creation, can help solve the problems facing us today. Help us create a sustainable art and a sustainable future. It's a big and interconnected issue and we could sure use your ideas.