Some might say that Marek Alaszewski is not modern, he is not avant-garde. That's true. He is a Bonnardian aesthete – a man of great culture and sensitivity, restrained in his painting experiments and bold in his music. Founder, vocalist and guitarist of the musical group Klan, playing alternative progressive rock in the late 1960s and 1970s. Successfully breaking the polite musical conventions of Polish big-beat. A musician programmatically not singing about love, instead about two-stroke bulldozers, razors and automatons. When Warsaw’s Ursynów was being built, he experimented with the sound of concrete slabs, rebar, pipes and well rings. Though it has been reactivated several times, Klan has remained on the sidelines of the Polish music scene due to its visionary and conceptual sound.As if in defiance, Ałaszewski’s painting surprises us with its lack of experimentation and avangardism, its traditional technique. This is unique at a time when originality has been made into a fetish. His world of dreams and reveries is a kind of escape from the coarseness and greyness of communist reality. There is an affirmation of nature in this art, a gushing optimism, vitality, joie de vivre, as well as a pantheistic homage to the work of creation.Alaszewski paints in an impressionistic manner, but this is by no means an impressionistic attempt at an objective analysis of the laws of absorption and diffusion of light and colour. Alaszewski is not an analyst, he is a poet. He uses an impressionistic language, but only as a set of grammatical forms, which he abandons in his late works for a flat, broad patch of colour. He creates paintings that are unpretentious and respectful of the subject, never crossing the boundary of deformation. Passed through the filter of his sensibility, nature is not dominated and attributed to apriori painterly assumptions. The creator is attentive and humble towards it, registering his feelings when faced with it. He discovers the extraordinary and the lyrical in seemingly ordinary motifs.There is a palpable tension in each of the paintings, as if an attempt to look beneath the lining of the visible world, to touch the unknowable. It is a study of the mystery of light, an attempt to penetrate its essence and thus get closer to the spirit that animates matter. Some paintings are so luminous that we almost succumb to the illusion and involuntarily squint our eyes.In the artist's early works, the outline melts into a shimmering play of lights and the vibration of small patches of colour. Over time, the silhouettes of objects and plant forms become more concrete. In the polyphony of colour, in the nuances of light, the painter plays the musical moment of the world he sees. The colours are delicate, savoured with tenderness, sensual. The harmonious tones of luminous ochres, greys and greens create a visual feast.The mood of Ałaszewski's paintings is maintained in the poetics of mystery and understatement, silence and the latent life of the places he observes. The creator tries to penetrate and reveal the inner mental states of things.The set of subjects narrows down to landscape. We find some familiar elements: a meadow, a path to the forest, dandelions, but also Venetian cityscapes, urban nocturnes, and finally impressions from Bali – a jungle, an oriental breakfast, a dinner in an exotic twilight.Intimate in both the act of creation and reception, Ałaszewski's paintings are imbued with silence and serenity, but there is also an independent, self-realised decorative value in them.This is the fourth presentation of the artist's work at Kordegarda. Gallery of the National Centre for Culture.Katarzyna Haber, curator of the exhibitionOrganizers: Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, National Center for Culture, Kordegarda. Gallery of the National Center for Culture