Dariusz Romanowski: Form, Decay, and the Human Condition

Dariusz Romanowski (b. 1965, Poland) is a self-taught contemporary artist based in the United Kingdom whose practice occupies the contested space between figuration and abstraction. Working across painting, drawing, and mixed-media installation, Romanowski has produced a body of work that resists easy categorisation, a quality he regards not as a limitation but as a deliberate condition of his artistic identity.

His work has been exhibited in group exhibitions across Europe, including showings at the Nicoleta Gallery (Berlin, 2024), the Thomson Gallery (Zug, 2024), and Andie Art Gallery (Athens, 2024), as well as thematic group exhibitions in Amsterdam ('On Being Human and Human Being', 2024; 'Residual Kinships', 2024) and several London venues. His works are held in private collections spanning the United States, Canada, and Europe.

This article draws upon Romanowski's own statements and the critical literature available on his practice to offer a comprehensive examination of his philosophy, creative process, and a selection of outstanding works.

Falling 5 (1995)

Philosophy and Artistic Identity

Romanowski's refusal to align with a singular style is not incidental; it is foundational. "I have no style," he states plainly. "From a young age, I've never wanted to paint in one particular way as I find it constricting." This position places him at odds with the mechanisms of the commercial art world, which tends to reward legibility and stylistic consistency. For Romanowski, such constraints are antithetical to the purpose of making art.

His practice is instead governed by what he describes as obsessions, persistent preoccupations with the human form, with mortality, with the nature of appearance and its dissolution. "The overriding themes in all art, I think, are life and death," he observes, "and those themes have opened all sorts of possibilities throughout the history of art." This is not a programmatic statement but a phenomenological one: Romanowski positions himself within the long continuity of art history, aware of both its weight and its utility.

He draws particular sustenance from the work of Rembrandt, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Michelangelo, Velázquez, and Picasso, artists for whom the rendering of flesh was inseparable from the rendering of interior states. Picasso's freedom and capacity for formal invention left a lasting impression from an early age, as did the raw psychological intensity of Bacon and the painterly intelligence of Auerbach. What Romanowski distils from these influences is not a manner of painting but a set of demands: that the mark must generate the image rather than merely illustrate it, and that technique and idea must function as one inseparable entity.

Romanowski reflects that his partner, Siofra, recently unlocked something within him that has allowed his work to evolve in directions he feels would not have been possible before meeting her. Though he cannot quite explain the change, he attributes it entirely to her.

This last point is elaborated in an interview published in Chrom-Art, in which critic Javier Melian observed that "Romanowski's practice successfully attempts to make idea and technique inseparable; a complete interlocking of image and paint where the image becomes the paint and vice versa." Romanowski himself has described this dynamic in terms drawn from Van Gogh, who wrote of making "incorrectness and deviations in reality which are lies but which he saw as truer than the literal truth." Distortion and artificiality, for Romanowski, are not failures of representation but instruments of a deeper fidelity.

Creative Process and Methodology

Romanowski's working method is characterised by immediacy, iteration, and deliberate openness to accident. He does not produce preparatory sketches or preliminary drawings. Instead, he works directly on canvas or board, visualising images in succession and pursuing them without mediation. "They evolve on the canvas in ways that are unexpected," he has noted, "and often in a better way than what I imagined by the marks the paint by chance creates."

He works simultaneously on multiple pieces, moving between them as each reaches a point of productive uncertainty. The notion of a completed work is, for Romanowski, provisional at best. "What is termed finish often simply means it's taken to a point whereby nothing more at that point can be done to it, but possibilities remain. It's therefore never really finished." This conception of incompletion is not defeatist; it reflects a rigorous understanding of the artwork as a process rather than a product.

His material choices are guided by the requirements of the mark rather than by convention. Alongside oil paint, which he values for its "endlessly unique mark-making capability and a luxurious feel when moved around on a surface", Romanowski has employed toothbrushes, scourers, fingerprints, and unconventional pigments (including blood, as documented in the Wall of Abstracted Human Forms). The orientation of the canvas itself is also subject to revision; he frequently rotates paintings during their creation to defamiliarise the surface and permit a fresher assessment of the evolving image.

This process-driven approach is consistent with his wider intellectual disposition. Romanowski identifies literary and philosophical figures such as Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, and Shakespeare as significant touchstones, alongside biographies and nonfiction that illuminate attitudes towards existence. His long-term artistic aim is articulated, with characteristic economy, as a paraphrase of Beckett: "to fail better."

Selected Works: A Critical Examination

The following works, currently available through Romanowski's ArtRewards profile, represent some of the most substantial and conceptually coherent pieces in his public catalogue. They have been selected based on their scale, material complexity, and critical significance.

Wall of Abstracted Human Forms (2000)

Oil, pigment, blood on canvas | 72 × 60 × 1 in (182.88 × 152.4 × 2.54 cm) 

Produced in 2000, Wall of Abstracted Human Forms is among the most formally and materially provocative works in Romanowski's extant catalogue. Executed in oil, pigment, and blood on canvas, a material decision that carries unmistakable symbolic weight, this large-scale work is the centrepiece of the Bodies series, which Romanowski describes as concerned with "the abstraction and destruction of faces, limbs and bodies through death."

The incorporation of blood as a pigment is not gratuitous. It functions within the pictorial logic of the work as both substance and sign: a material that is simultaneously paint and flesh, mark and wound. This conflation of medium and subject achieves precisely the inseparability of idea and technique that defines Romanowski's practice at its most resolved. The body is not merely depicted, it participates, materially, in its own representation and dissolution.

At a scale that commands architectural presence, the painting operates as a field of compressed forms rather than a conventional figurative composition. The human figures that populate the canvas are not individuated; they press against one another and against the picture plane, their features indistinct, their identities subsumed by mass and motion. This formal strategy resonates with the work of Bacon, particularly his triptychs, in which the body is rendered as an event rather than a portrait, subject to forces that exceed psychological containment.

Art critic Sylvie Samani, writing more broadly on Romanowski's figurative works, has drawn attention to "the disintegration of flesh, form and features" as a recurrent preoccupation, one that connects his Bodies series to a long tradition of Vanitas imagery while reinterpreting it through the lens of modern existential thought. The Wall of Abstracted Human Forms may be understood as a contemporary Vanitas: not a memento mori addressed to a morally instructed viewer, but an ontological statement about the condition of embodied existence.

Human Forms 2 (1995)

Oil, pigment on canvas | 52 × 72 × 1 in (132.08 × 182.88 × 2.54 cm) 

Dating to 1995, Human Forms 2 represents an earlier and, in certain respects, more restrained engagement with the same thematic terrain as Wall of Abstracted Human Forms. Executed in oil and pigment on canvas at a substantial scale, the work forms part of the Bodies series and shares its central concern with "the progression of the treatment, representation and eventual destruction of the human form," as the artist has noted.

Where Wall of Abstracted Human Forms employs unconventional materials to intensify its conceptual charge, Human Forms 2 achieves its effects through the deployment of oil paint alone, a medium that Romanowski handles with considerable authority. The work demonstrates his facility with tonal gradation, gestural mark-making, and the construction of pictorial depth without recourse to conventional spatial logic.

The earlier date of this canvas situates it within the formative phase of Romanowski's sustained engagement with the human figure, and as such, it offers a valuable point of comparative reference. The treatment of the figure is already characterised by the compression and abstraction that define his mature work, but the painterly surface retains a legibility that the later works progressively abandon. Viewed in sequence with the 2000 canvas, the development of Romanowski's formal language becomes discernible: an arc from representation towards dissolution.

From a collector's perspective, Human Forms 2 occupies an important position in the chronological narrative of Romanowski's practice. It constitutes both a document of the artist's development and an accomplished work in its own right, one that rewards extended viewing.

Snowscene (2015)

Wood, leaves, cotton wool, emulsion, pine needles | 48 × 48 × 23 in (121.92 × 121.92 × 58.42 cm)

Snowscene is the most formally anomalous work in Romanowski's ArtRewards catalogue and, in many respects, his most technically ambitious. Produced in 2015 and forming the sole entry in the Snowscenes collection, it extends his practice into three-dimensional territory through the incorporation of organic materials, wood, leaves, pine needles, and cotton wool into a painted surface, resulting in a work whose depth (23 inches) situates it at the boundary between painting and sculpture.

The conceptual logic of the work is stated clearly by the artist: "In the Snowscenes series, the usage of real trees, foliage, leaves and branches builds a sculptural effect into the paintings. This allows lighting to become an actor in its own right on the paintings, changing and evolving the work depending on the form and placement of the lighting." What this means in practice is that Snowscene is not a static object. Its appearance shifts in response to environmental conditions, the angle and quality of light, the viewer's position, and the time of day. The work is constitutively dynamic.

This engagement with light as an active formal element places Snowscene in dialogue with practices associated with Arte Povera and certain strands of Land Art, in which natural materials are introduced into the gallery context to challenge the passivity of the conventional viewing encounter. Romanowski's interest is somewhat different, however: he is less concerned with the institutional critique implicit in such moves than with the phenomenological reality of immersion. "The viewer becomes immersed and part of the painting itself," he notes. "The Snowscenes are therefore created in and of themselves, in a circular but dual reality."

This "dual reality", the work as both representation and material instantiation of its subject, is the most fully realised expression of Romanowski's longstanding pursuit of an inseparability between image and substance. The snow is not painted; it is, in some measure, present. The landscape does not merely depict nature; it is constructed from it.

Snowscene is a work of considerable formal intelligence and stands as a compelling demonstration of Romanowski's capacity to operate across disciplinary boundaries without sacrificing conceptual rigour.

Heads Series, Selected Works (2015–2023)

Various media (oil on paper; acrylic on paper; mixed media) | Multiple dimensions 

The Heads series, comprising fifteen works spanning almost a decade, represents the most sustained and formally concentrated expression of Romanowski's engagement with the human face. Working in oil on paper, acrylic on paper, and mixed media, he returns repeatedly to the same subject: the female head, subjected to progressive degrees of distortion, abstraction, and erasure.

The artist's own account of the series is instructive: "In the Heads, I returned to Women as subjects exploring further the themes of abstraction of form first explored in the Bodies series. The Heads are studies of the effect of movement, abstraction and distortion on the faces of the Women. With the Heads, as with other works, I work directly and rapidly, forming the image with an immediate yet ordered chance of brush strokes. This immediacy of brush stroke represents and mirrors the actual disintegration of flesh and features and gives the works an undiluted purity, like the first brush stroke on a blank wall."

The critical literature available on these works offers a substantive framework for their interpretation. Sylvie Samani, in her two-part critical examination 'Turbulent Expression' (sylviesamani.com, 2016), provides a detailed analysis of the formal and philosophical dimensions of Romanowski's expressive heads. Samani identifies the toothbrush as one of the unconventional implements Romanowski employs as a key instrument in the series, noting that it "investigates the human face's potentiality for expression and its rising emergences. Each image produced acts like a quantifier measuring the degree of emotion." This observation is significant: it positions the works not as expressions of individual psychological states but as structural investigations of the capacity for expression itself.

Samani's analysis also highlights the series' cumulative dimension. "In fact, in order to fully grasp the scaling," she writes, "the observer needs to observe several works simultaneously." This is a formal property that Romanowski's serial method is specifically designed to produce. No single head completes the investigation; the meaning emerges through sequence, contrast, and accumulated density.

The movement across the series from images of concentrated, turbulent expressivity to those in which features have been partially or wholly dissolved maps onto a trajectory that Samani reads through the philosophical tradition of Vanitas: a meditation on mortality, identity, and the irreversibility of time. The latter heads, in particular, in which features are reduced to a residue of marks, recall what Samani describes as "a contemporary interpretation of a Vanity in motion."

Women Series, Selected Works (2016–2023)

Various media (oil on canvas; oil on paper; mixed media) | Multiple dimensions

The Women series constitutes one of the most profound and nuanced explorations in Romanowski’s practice, delving further into the themes of transience, identity, and the instability of representation that are central to his oeuvre. Across these works, the female figure is both the subject and the site of experimentation, investigated through a vocabulary of vigorous brushwork, layering, and erasure.

Signature pieces showcase Romanowski’s ability to oscillate between abstraction and figuration with great sensitivity. In these canvases, facial or bodily features emerge and dissolve into painterly gestures, creating a tension between recognition and obscurity.

The use of unconventional materials and the spontaneous choreography of the paintings reinforce the artist’s central preoccupations: that identity is provisional, mutable, and never entirely knowable. Critically, these works underscore Romanowski’s statement that "the overriding themes in all art are life and death," while articulating the complexities of femininity, emotion, and subjectivity within a contemporary frame. Collectively, the Women series exemplifies his commitment to challenging the boundaries between depiction and expression, and remains among the most compelling works in his public catalogue.

Contributions to Contemporary Practice

Romanowski's significance within contemporary British and European figurative art lies partly in his tenacity in pursuing the human form as a subject at a moment when much critical discourse has directed attention elsewhere, and partly in the rigour with which he has developed a practice that refuses conventional resolution.

His self-taught status is not incidental to this assessment. Unlike artists formed within institutional contexts, Romanowski has constructed his relationship to art history through direct, sustained engagement with primary sources, the works themselves, encountered in galleries and reproduced in books. This has produced a practice that is deeply informed by tradition yet unbent to it: one that draws from Rembrandt's treatment of flesh, Bacon's dissolution of the figure, and Auerbach's gestural accumulation without reproducing any of them.

The exhibition record of recent years demonstrates a growing institutional recognition of that practice. The thematic groupings in which his work has appeared, 'On Being Human and Human Being' (Amsterdam, 2024), 'Residual Kinships' (Amsterdam, 2024), suggest that curators are positioning Romanowski within broader conversations about embodiment, relationality, and the limits of representation. These are not marginal concerns.

His perspective on the role of technology in art, expressed with characteristic directness, also merits attention. "Technology is just another tool," he states. "Art of any meaning has to have the imprint of the individual, otherwise it's lifeless decoration or wallpaper." In an era of considerable anxiety about the relationship between human creativity and automated image production, this position offers a considered rather than a reactive perspective, one grounded in a coherent understanding of what distinguishes meaningful artistic production 

Closing Remarks

The body of work that Dariusz Romanowski has produced over several decades constitutes a sustained and demanding engagement with questions that have occupied painters since the Renaissance: what the human form can bear as a subject, and what the act of painting can reveal that other modes of expression cannot. His refusal of stylistic consistency, his embrace of accident and revision, and his insistence on the inseparability of material and meaning place him within a tradition of serious pictorial enquiry that rewards extended attention.

The works examined in this article, from the materially charged surfaces of the Bodies series to the phenomenological complexity of Snowscene and the sequential investigations of the Heads, offer a representative cross-section of a practice that continues to develop.

Readers are encouraged to explore the full range of Dariusz Romanowski's available works on his ArtRewards profile, where original works across multiple series are available for acquisition, and further details on his exhibition history and commission enquiries can be found.