SUSPENDED IN TIME
By Polish art historian Joanna Dobkowska-Kubacka.

A realistically, softly painted girl with anemones, a man with a chair, a woman hanging up Chinese lanterns - all of these paintings are strongly connected with the canvases of the old masters--and not just because of their figurativeness. They show respect for traditional values that the art of painting has always cherished: color, drawing, and composition. At the same time, they reveal high workshop fluency, which is rarer and rarer and therefore a more and more precious quality. Michał Zaborowski, brought up in the shade of an easel (his father was a painter) and a graduate of the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts, is an experienced artist who knows how to apply paint on canvas in order to achieve the desired effect. A brushstroke with high accuracy, in a specific spot, and with the right force touches the canvas. The artist is capable of reflecting the nature of a metal stool, a paper lantern or the starched apron of a waitress by careful strokes of a brush. Michał Zaborowski has flawless drawing skills, but it is his coloring virtuosity that inspired admiration. You could stop here, without investigating further, to start experiencing Zaborowski's paintings as a refined show of colors - their sets and hues. His art confirms the generally known truth: a painting is a surface on which specific tasks are resolved by the use of paint. The pictorial tissue of the painting - fracture, composition, light, color - is the base of art. His paintings are softly edged - the paint is applied lightly and freely. Colors usually create calm symphony of dimmed hues, but they can also suddenly incandesce and scream. It also happens that a color - a hero - boldly moves to the foreground and sings sharply, having a dimmed chorus behind it.

Determining the coloring on a painting seems to come easily to the artist; he is gifted with an extreme sense of color. Thus, Zaborowski is passionate and playful about composition. He tests alternating combinations and investigates the elasticity and the extendibility of classical schemata. Space is treated by Zaborowski experimentally - he cuts it, covers it up and then again builds it up out of pieces. Through this, he creates an atmosphere of uneasiness and reticence. The artist believes that in art there should be mystery. A canvas asks questions for which there are, and ought to be, no straightforward answers. A painting which leaves the care of the artist's brush and starts its journey in the world, becomes the ground for individual explorations and discoveries. Saying something plainly and clearly, without leaving a margin for free interpretation, expressing something bluntly and to the letter is not what Michał Zaborowski likes the most. Therefore, he veils and covers up, lightly opens the painted door - to keep the mystery within the painting. He does not cast bright light onto the secret. Reveled, the mystery will wash away and disappear. Dusk is safer for it.

Usually, the scene is close and narrow, but because of the behind-the-coulisse effect that Zaborowski creates, we can be sure that there exists a space hidden to our eyes that spreads behind the curtain. A depth is created that drags the viewer in. The composition of Zaborowski's paintings enhances the climate of secrets and initiation. The artist builds an intimate space around his characters, and for the viewers he leaves an impression that they are spying on these characters, as if they were looking into the painting through half-open (or half-closed) doors. The thoroughly designed composition often makes a mischievous impression of a composition created by pure chance, caught in a frame without much consideration.

Sensuality of color and enigmaticalness of space, built through Zaborowski's composition, allow the painter to suggestively create a different world - an alternative to reality. His paintings are reflective, melancholic stories without time or space - told sparingly with only the most meaningful requisites. The painter's tales happen everywhere and nowhere, they repeat - always. They show a moment of anticipation which drags on intolerably long, suspended outside in different time that flows at its usual pace. Zaborowski's characters are lonely, they pass each other by, they walk past each other, beside each other. Alienated and drowning in their own world they adjoin accidentally and meet "in transit". Zaborowski's paintings reflect the mood of waiting in vain, waiting to no avail, resignation. Somebody still has hope, someone is still waiting, yet someone else already leaves the stage and shuts the door behind. Something has ended, waiting was futile and lighting the lanterns did not bring the anticipated joy.

In this world of astray and expectancy, beautiful and sensual women reign. They break out from anonymity. Melancholic and drowned in their own thoughts, they wear feminine dresses of flowing lines. These softly executed outfits, without unnecessary details and decorations, emphasizing slenderness and airiness of the figure, often look simplified and archaized. They resemble outfits worn hundred years ago, but in the painter's belief they are a timeless raiment, which makes women's beauty stand out. Similarly, Zaborowski's paintings seem to historize. Some of them resemble canvases of the end of the 19th century, yet his art is not anachronistic - it is suspended in time. The artist knows well the achievements of the history of art; often, visits to museums are his inspiration. In this way, art is created which newly discovers and creatively interprets the classics. His paintings are poetic and moody, but their pictorial beauty extracted from the presented subjects is even more important than climate and atmosphere.

Zaborowski's art aesthetizes and tempts with escapism, allowing us a retreat from hideousness. The paintings, even though beautiful, are intended as more than an indifferent subject of aesthetic contemplation. The artist, who is emotionally connected with his paintings, wants the viewer also not to remain detached. He expects personal involvement and experience of this art. A painting that leaves his atelier and continues to live in somebody's house, in someone's closest surroundings, should become an element of the interior so irreplaceable that, if removed, would leave an empty, gaping hole in one's consciousness.