Iwo Zaniewski
- 1 day ago
- 9 min read
Based in Warsaw, Iwo Zaniewski is a painter and graduate of the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts. His works show people inside rooms, with attention given to color, objects, and the arrangement of space.
In our interview, Zaniewski talks about how his images begin, why interiors continue to appear in his work, and how he thinks about composition while painting. We also speak about memory, travel, and the visual situations that stay with him and later return in a painting.
Q: How did you first begin painting?
A: I began painting quite naturally. As a child I spent a lot of time sketching and drawing the world around me – people in rooms, objects on tables, fragments of interiors. Looking back, I realise that what fascinated me even then was not only the subject itself but how things relate to one another within a space.
I also grew up in a very visual environment. My father was an architect, my stepfather an art critic, and my mother was a scenographer working in theatre and opera. As a child I often visited theatres where she designed sets and costumes. I remember being surrounded by sketches, fabrics, stage constructions, and lighting tests. Those early experiences made me very sensitive to colour, patterns, and spatial arrangements. Later, I studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, where painting became a more conscious pursuit. What interested me early on was not simply representing things but understanding why certain images feel complete while others feel unresolved.
Over time, I became increasingly preoccupied with composition. I noticed that when the relationships between forms, colours, and proportions are right, a painting acquires a particular stability – a sense that nothing can be moved without weakening the whole. That pursuit has stayed with me for decades and eventually led me to explore the mechanisms of visual harmony more systematically, both through painting and through interdisciplinary research.
Q: Many of your paintings start from everyday moments. What makes a moment like that stay with you?
A: Usually, it is not the event itself that stays with me but the arrangement of things within a moment. A certain posture of a person, the way light enters a room, the distance between objects on a table – suddenly everything aligns in a way that feels visually inevitable. Often these moments pass very quickly. You might notice them only for a few seconds. But something about the balance of the scene remains in memory. It is almost like an afterimage. Sometimes it stays with me for years before it returns while I am painting.
What interests me is that everyday life constantly produces these small, quiet compositions. People sitting, reading, resting, talking. Nothing dramatic is happening. Yet occasionally the relationships between forms, colours, and space become very precise, almost as if the scene had composed itself. When I paint, I rarely try to reproduce the moment exactly. Memory simplifies things. It removes many details and leaves only what was essential to the visual structure of the scene. What remains is the underlying relationships between the elements.
Q: Interiors often appear in your work. What interests you about these spaces?
A: Interiors interest me because they accumulate time. A room carries traces of the people who inhabit it – conversations, gestures, habits, the way light enters at different hours of the day. Even when nothing is happening, a space can hold a certain atmosphere.
Perhaps this sensitivity also comes from my childhood. As I mentioned, my mother worked in theatre as a scenographer, so I spent a lot of time around stage sets. A stage interior is never just a meaningless background, because its purpose is to create the conditions in which a scene unfolds. In painting I often think of interiors in a similar way. I am also interested in the relationship between the interior space and the world outside. Windows appear frequently in my paintings because they create a dialogue between two different spatial realities: the controlled space of the room and the open, less predictable space beyond it.
This relationship allows the composition to expand. The interior becomes a place where small gestures happen – like someone sitting, reading, thinking – while the exterior introduces distance, light, and a sense of the wider world. From a compositional perspective, this tension between inside and outside creates a dynamic structure. It allows the painting to breathe while maintaining the internal harmony of the space.
Q: You’ve written about harmony as the main logic of a composition. How do you work toward that while painting?
A: Harmony is not something I impose on a painting at the end. It emerges gradually through the relationships between elements as the work develops. While painting I constantly adjust proportions, colours, contrasts, and distances between forms. Even a very small shift – moving an object slightly or altering the intensity of a colour – can change the entire structure of the image.
What I am looking for is a moment when all the elements begin to support one another. When that happens, the composition acquires a certain stability. It feels as if every form has found its place and removing or altering one element would disturb the balance of the whole. In my view, harmony does not come from a single rule or proportion but from a complex network of relationships within the image. When those relationships align, the painting reaches a point where any further change begins to weaken it. When I sense that moment in a painting, I stop. That is usually when the image has found its harmony.
Q: You’ve researched visual harmony with psychologists and neuroscientists. What led you to explore painting in that way?
A: It began with a very simple observation that came directly from painting. As I mentioned, while working on a canvas I eventually reach a moment when the composition feels complete. Not finished in terms of detail, but complete structurally – as if the painting had found its internal balance. At that point even a very small change could weaken the whole image.
For many years I wondered what exactly happens in that moment. Why does my eye recognise harmony so clearly? Painters have always spoken about balance, proportion, or the golden ratio, but these explanations never seemed sufficient to me. They describe certain historical methods, but they do not fully explain the experience of harmony. This curiosity eventually led to an interdisciplinary collaboration with psychologists, neuroscientists, and scholars of aesthetics. Together we worked on understanding the perceptual mechanisms that allow the human brain to recognise harmonious visual structures. Our research focused on the interactions between forms, colours, contrasts, and spatial relationships within an image.
What became clear was that harmony does not come from a single rule or formula. It emerges from a complex network of relationships that stabilise the image as a whole. When those relationships are balanced, the composition reaches a point where any further change begins to weaken it. We summarised many of these observations in a project called Composition Matters, which attempts to describe the mechanism behind visual harmony without reducing painting to a purely technical formula. There is a website dedicated to our research: www.compositionmatters.org
Painting was the starting point of this research, and in many ways it confirmed something painters have always sensed intuitively — that harmony is a precise but deeply human experience.
Q: How do you think about the relationship between colour, objects, and empty space when building a composition?
A: For me, objects are never independent elements. They function primarily as shapes within a larger structure. A chair, a lamp, or a figure in a room is important not only because of what it represents, but because of the space it occupies and the relationships it creates with other forms in the painting. In that sense, every object becomes part of a larger visual system. Its position, scale, and orientation influence the balance of the entire composition.
Colour plays a similar role. I often think of colour as a kind of weight within the image. A strong colour can anchor one part of the painting, while a quieter tone allows another area to open and breathe. Sometimes colour carries the structure of the composition even more strongly than the objects themselves. Empty space is equally important. Without it the painting becomes crowded and the relationships between elements are harder to perceive. Space allows the eye to move and helps reveal the connections between forms. Very often the most important decision in a composition is not what to add but what to leave out.
When colour, objects, and space begin to support one another, the painting acquires a certain stability. Each element becomes necessary for the others. That moment of mutual balance — an agreement of elements where I see there is nothing to add or remove — is what I call harmony.
Q: Several of your paintings connect to places you lived or travelled, including Spain in the 1980s. How have those environments stayed with you in your work?
A: Spain was very important for me. In the early 1980s I spent time in Barcelona, working and living among people connected with theatre and scenography. Their apartments were extraordinary places: old interiors filled with objects, paintings, fabrics, strong colours, and a very particular quality of Mediterranean light. I was surrounded by works of artists like Miró and Picasso, quite often literally hanging on the walls of those apartments. That environment left a very strong visual memory.
Many of my later paintings return to those interiors indirectly. Not as precise reconstructions, but as atmospheres — the colour of the walls, the way light enters a room, the feeling of sitting by a window and observing the city outside. Travel in general has had a similar effect. When you move between places you begin to notice how different spaces organise light, colour, and everyday life. Those impressions remain with you and eventually find their way into painting.
Q: Has your work as a photographer and commercial director influenced how you construct an image?
A: I consider myself first and foremost a painter, and it is my way of seeing the world as a painter that informs everything else I do — whether it is photography, film, or directing commercials. Composition always comes first. The relationships between elements within a frame, the way light shapes space, and how the eye travels through an image are questions that come directly from painting.
Over the years I have directed several hundred television commercials and worked with extraordinary teams of people — including Oscar-nominated cinematographers, set designers, composers, and editors. Each production is a complex visual collaboration: carefully constructed sets, precisely designed lighting, music composed for the image, and movement unfolding within the frame. In many ways it resembles a large, temporary studio where an image is built step by step. Working with moving images sharpened my sensitivity to rhythm, timing, and atmosphere. Film forces you to think about what happens before and after the frame, how a sequence unfolds in time, and how attention shifts within a scene. That awareness has also informed how I think about situations and gestures in painting.
At the same time, the direction of influence has always been very clear to me. It was my experience as a painter that shaped the way I approached film and photography from the beginning. Even when working with moving images, I always search for the moment when the frame itself holds together as a composition. In that sense painting remains the central discipline — it is the place where all my visual thinking ultimately returns.
Q: What are you interested in exploring next in your work?
A: For many years my work has focused on achieving harmony within a composition — understanding how forms, colours, and spaces can reach a state where they support one another perfectly. That interest has not disappeared, but recently I have become curious about pushing against my own habits.
After working for decades within a visual language that I know well, I sometimes feel the need to disturb it slightly. I experiment with beginning a painting from an element that would normally seem incorrect, like a colour that feels too strong, a form that appears difficult to integrate, or a spatial relationship that initially resists harmony. Starting from such an unstable point often leads the painting into unexpected directions.
At the same time, I am searching for a way of interpreting reality in painting that might surprise me with its own internal coherence. Not abstraction, but a distilled vision of the world that suddenly feels complete, as if it allows me to understand the structure of reality more clearly. I sometimes feel that I have reached a certain maximum of expression with the forms I currently use. They create a strong visual impact, often almost like a poster: from a distance the image immediately strikes the viewer, and as you come closer more layers and details begin to appear.
What I hope for in future paintings is a moment when everything aligns with absolute clarity — when an image appears that is powerful, coherent, and unmistakable, holding together with a force that feels both inevitable and alive.
