Stanisław Baj - Light and water

About

Jacek Sempoliński in their diaries recalls the statement of Stefan Gierowski that after carefully watching the Hermitage " Prodigal Son" by Rembrandt had to announce, pointing to the hot streak of light at the foot of a kneeling young man, I paint only that .

In looking at recent paintings by Stanislaw Baja come to the conclusion that the artist is heading towards new shores, transferring the flowing water of the Bug as if to another dimension, because the light is becoming the leading current of the river, it is real and already beating with its own, one would like to say with a mystical glow.
The artist's fascination with light separates the banks of the Bug from each other, the river is increasingly becoming an abstract creation, a platform for luminous layers, an arena of light-dark play, spirit with matter. Baj is still afraid of the domination of light in his paintings, he tries to organize and discipline the foggy blurring of the native landscape in them. You can see that he still wants to walk hard on his land, stumble over its stones, which it is no coincidence that he paints as independent creations.
And yet the process of increasingly stronger synthesis of the landscape, rendering the field glistening with glow, becomes a fact, because the need for painterly dissolution in the dawn of the morning or dusk of the day clearly does not give the artist peace. This may not be a teleologically continuous, progressive process, but it is noticeable, despite the fact that the artist defends himself against it, sometimes playing with luminosity, imposing on it even stage functions when it falls like a curtain, partly obscuring the Bug River landscape with its bright shroud. Baj sometimes closes the curtain, squeezes it into the cracks, as if for his own peace he wanted to trap her in a bright sheaf.
But won't light eventually pull the artist behind and become a leaven for a new chapter in his painting? Maybe soon Stanisław Baj will begin to confess slowly from the sin of moving away from his own land, which has been studied patiently for years, from a safe, tame, own perspective. The temptation to look more transcendent now seems closer to him than before.

Jerzy Wojciechowski
Vellano, 4 July 2019