Writer and art critic, Jerzy Madeyski, about my art:
When will people understand - wrote a man hardly to be suspected of traditionalism, for it was Karol Szymanowski himself - that there is no genuine art, that every artist is an aristocrat that needs to have those twelve generations consisting of Bachs and Beethovens if he is a musician, Sophocles' and Shakespeares if he is a playwright and a poet, and if he disowns his ancestors or does not know them, then despite even the greatest talent he will at best be a foolish botcher...
The roots of Włodzimierz Szpinger's genealogical tree are rooted in the soil of the cool north. They draw the sap from the fearful legends of misshapen trolls and medieval mysticism filled with fear and its northern contempt for "the hideous home of soul," which according to Grzegorz Wielki, is our body.
But inspiration is not only from these roots. Szpinger's art draws equally from the Renaissance fascination with nature's beauty, from the willingness to understand everything that surrounds us, and is struck by the atavistic reserves of our subconscience, the irresistible desire to comprehend things both big and small of which the tissue of this surrounding world consists. This desire is embodied in his drawing, with his cognitive and structural abilities, identical in the art of the great van Eycks and even greater Durer or Memling- with whom the artist feels special reverence. This is the drawing about which Federigo Zuccaro was soon to write- "neither matter nor body, it is however an idea, an order, a dale, an object of mind, an understanding and a desire..."
Our European mystique of light flourishes fully in the dark north. It is here, between mist-wrapped Ireland and the Germanic lands that the theories discerning the proof for the existence of Paradise in light were born. "Material lighting, both those which are naturally scattered over the sky and those kindled on Earth intentionally by man, are the images of mental lights and above all the real light or God who is light" writes Jan Szkot Erigena, seconded by Suger, the abbot of a Europe glistening with Gothic stained-glass windows where, "costliness, light, colourfulness move the soul from the material sphere to the sphere of the sacred."
The aesthetics of the Middle Ages is based on the light and aspiration for it, for seizing its fleeting arcana and esoteric secrets in the shimmering gold mosaics of the south and the painting of the north, this material weaves from the light characters of Froquet and the parables of Hieronymus Bosch. Włodzimierz Szpinger is following their example with one but vital reservation: he only takes from his progenitors what he feels is right and close to him, to multiply their experience by his own awareness.
Szpinger took over their ravishing techniques, its splendor and solidity of workmanship. All of its diligent proficiency, which is according to a Kraków humanist Heyderek-Mirika, a principal virtue of Master Stwosz and his altar, "for that art's craftsman was... strangely solid and diligent, his reason and work famous among Christianity, his work orders for centuries..." since the perfection of the techniques was a separate aesthetic category at the time. Thus, of his own free will, Szpinger uses the remarkably laborious and time-consuming technique of layered painting: he first applies primer, then tempera, next oil in numerous scrumbles, and each layer is separated with a "table-top" of varnish- achieveing a marvelous lightness and transparency of the painting matter, which especially today in the age of nonchalant vista painting particularly delights us. Its colour gives splendor to a drawing. Unrestrained but expressive drawing of the late Gothic style with simply sculpting values emphasizing the massive three-dimensionality of the reality and the system of its surfaces.