Ryszard Rabsztyn

"My work has gone through various stages: from graphics, through drawing,

and finally painting. My fascination with painting has lasted relatively

short, since 2010, when a painting annex was created

to my drawing diploma. After graduating from the Academy, I focused

exclusively on painting. I became fascinated with expressionism and

prehistoric art? Both of these trends, to a greater or lesser extent,

run through my work, both through form and content.

Currently, in my searches, I focus primarily on

hieroglyphic writing and the Braille alphabet. I try to "write down" my

paintings more than to paint. In this way, I express all

my thoughts and current interests. I have the impression that my artistic path has, in a sense,

come full circle. The years I spent in the art high school revolved around graphics,

modeling and lettering. My longing for these fields of art manifests itself

in the desire combining all of them in painting.

In order to achieve the intended effects, I am constantly improving my
workshop, which is why each painting is a new experiment. I often "depart" very far from the traditional approach in
painting. This is the result of a constant search for the ideal form, as well as
the implementation of the idea of ??"painting for the blind".

This last project was born about two years ago, when
I decided to finish one of my paintings, using only dots obtained with a fineliner.
Because I like challenges, I decided to go a step further and build subsequent paintings
only using dots. Using all kinds of paints and
grounds, I continued this process. Driven by curiosity about what was hidden
further, I painted what interested me at the time. In a sense,
only the form mattered. I treated my work on the painting as
a kind of meditation or prayer, which I was then starting to
learn. So, perseverance was the most important thing. I created

larger and more complicated compositions, to

prove to myself each time that nothing could stop me.

At the same time, the desire to create something

valuable, something new, fresh grew within me; some kind of

idea was germinating within me. The breakthrough came in the least

expected place - on a bus, where my attention was drawn to the

Braille marking of the STOP button. For me, that moment meant the right

start. I knew right away that I had to learn this alphabet and apply it

to painting. I still wanted to put only dots on the canvas, but now

each of them had a specific meaning. I decided that I would paint, or rather, write

only in this way. The idea became clear: I wanted to paint for the blind. From then on, I faced the problem of how

to build paintings so that blind people could read them freely. At the same time, I wanted each painting to be

attractive - also for sighted people. The idea was constantly evolving and I decided to create something like a riddle - a message encoded in Braille, which the viewer would be forced to decipher like ancient hieroglyphs.

According to the words of Saint Augustine,

Faith means thought present in the spirit. I try to express these thoughts in
my art. I paint by writing about what I believe in."