Wacław Szpakowski (1883–1973) was an artist, architect, photographer and musician. Being a forerunner of geometric art, minimal art and op-art, he became the leading figure in the shaping of the Polish geometric avant-garde. Szpakowski believed in the possibility of creating a coherent visual system to describe the reality that surrounds us. Fascinated in the rhythmic repetitiveness of nature, his abstract way of thinking drove him into exploring linear schemes in various phenomena present in nature, architecture, science and art. This approach became the fundament for creating systems of graphic descriptions of linear infinities, and later on for creating patterns of rhythmical lines. He described his own language of forms and signs, which in his art strived to reflect the partial structure of the world. Dutch writer W.F Hermans saw in his work what he called a “primal passion of infinity researchers, explorers of the structure of the world”.
In the field of visual arts, Szpakowski offered a new trajectory of art development, leading it out of the “primary state” rooted in the culture of ancient Greece into the contemporary. While doing so, he consciously omitted the state of traditional illusionist art based on representation and central perspective, with the image within the frame being its staple example. His drawings ignore the great problematics of the image, so fundamental not only for the medium of painting, but also underlying the practice of new media, and foremost photography and film.
Rhythmical lines are a syncretic piece, reaching toward common characteristics of art, science, visual practices, music, and more in a symbolic way, literature. As Matila Ghyka puts it, referring rhythmical lines to contemporary mathematics and ancient knowledge, they can simultaneously be a work of art, music and science.
