Artur "Gouy" Golacki

If the criteria for being an artist were based on maintaining an individual point of view and defining it by equally individual visual language, I would place myself back in the mid-eighties where my big journey started. Just imagine a group of friends studying together under the roof of The Academy of Fine Arts in Wroclaw, one of the biggest cities in Poland, a country those days plagued by political crisis. In times like this the last thing people care about is art and as silly as it may look now, our professors were no exception. But for us it was a long awaited paradise. The Luxus (‘luxury’) art group was created out of funny smelling smoke and other even more funny substances. Anything original and weird enough to match our special taste was acceptable.

Usually, situations like this stimulate my intellect perfectly. I simply decided to stop questioning myself about ‘what?" and ‘why?’ and let intuition and pure imagination work. The true seeds of creativity were planted and I started to exercise my freedom. My favorite medium was "rediscovered," stemming from a childhood love of drawing on magazines and newspapers. Today I jokingly call it ‘hand made Photoshop.’ Technically speaking it was the irritatingly simple process of removing parts of photographic images (usually from glossy magazines or posters) with pencil erasers or small amounts of white spirits and working on the erased space with pencil and brush. The photography referred to ‘objective’ reality and by blending it with my interpretation of the invisible realm I was hoping to get a picture closer to true. Despite the huge benefit my country could have received from this unscientific research, after a few exhibitions the only critique offered was from mental health institutions. So I left Poland with a small rucksack on my back, $60 in one pocket and a divorce paper in other.