Fantazorarium:

The mysterious visual narratives of Henryk Fantazos by Tom Patterson

A person or thing detached from the main body or system, and/or differing from all other members of a particular group—that’s an outlier. It’s a term well suited to Henryk Fantazos, an intrepid outlier among contemporary artists.

Although he underwent years of fine-art training in his native Poland, Fantazos describes himself as self-taught. He had to learn on his own the techniques of illusionistic painting, which he deemed essential to conveying his idiosyncratic narrative vision. Although practiced by Western artists for centuries, these techniques had fallen out of fashion by the 1960s. They were apparently unknown to—or at least disregarded by—Fantazos’ academic teachers.

“My professors were ‘modern artists,’” he recalls with thinly veiled contempt. “They had no use or respect for the last 10,000 years of Occidental painting. Smearing, collage, and ‘happenings’ were their contributions to the reversal of our culture.”

He’s clearly proud to stand apart from activities he considers decadent and corrosive.

Fantazos holds a master’s degree from the Fine Arts Academy in Kraków, but like many artists—and even more individuals who later abandoned the practice—he began making art as a child. His earliest related memory is drawing three chimney sweeps in a boat when he was four.There’s always been a strong narrative dimension to Fantazos' work, although the specifics are no clearer than a single scene can contain. By refusing to provide handy contextual background information for his imagery, he implicitly encourages viewers to invent their own stories about it.

Never at a loss for what to paint, Fantazos admits to a kind of compulsive mental imaging—a mind perpetually swarming with potential subject matter. For him the difficulty comes in selecting the particular components for a painting and rendering them with maximum fidelity to his original vision.

“The process of creating a piece of art,” he explains, “is in isolating one object after another and asking: ‘Is this object rediscovered as a living, expressive being?”

If a scene, an image, or an arrangement of objects appears in his mind’s eye, it’s fair game. That said, certain themes recur in his work—theatricality and performance, for example, as in the traveling-circus or commedia-dell’arte traditions.

The artist’s vantage point is invariably that of a wanderer in an unfamiliar landscape, although viewers from his adopted terrain will recognize many of his vistas as distinctly southern, physically if not thematically grounded in the American South, where he has lived since the late 1970s. Swamps, dense woods, remote fields, small towns, rural hideaways, and darkly unidentifiable gothic interiors are among his favored settings.

Fellini meets Faulkner.

Existing first in his exalted imagination, these scenes re-emerge on paper, canvas, or copper etching plate through his tight visual focus and skilled manipulation of tools and materials. His every effort goes toward faithful reproduction of the envisioned picture and what he calls the “anatomical truth” of its inhabitants, including flora, fauna, and human characters—the latter often visually based on friends and acquaintances who model for him.

Analytically inclined viewers are welcome to search for hidden meanings and deeper truths, but Fantazos declines to follow us down any interpretational rabbit holes. We are thus left to our own devices when it comes to understanding or creatively reading his work.Each composition unspools multiple narratives simultaneously. Fantazos seems to delight in multiplying the stories exponentially, pushing the visible contents as far as possible—and beyond.

A personal favorite, exemplary in the latter respect, is Nenufarium, whose title combines the Latin word for water lily—a proliferent image in the painting—with the ‘arium’ suffix, as in terrarium or aquarium, signifying a three-dimensional enclosure, also akin to a cabinet of curiosities. A straightforward English-language equivalent would be ‘Water-lily World.’

And what do we see going on in Fantazos’ Water-lily World?

First, there's the pond, lake, or tranquil river’s edge in the immediate foreground, where specimens of the titular plant abound. This otherwise conventionally beautiful landscape is the setting for some strange and mysterious occurrences. Free-floating near the center is an abandoned rowboat containing a pair of oars, and emerging near the shore are several open-mouthed alligators performing an aquatic ballet.

Oddest of all is a man immersed to his waist in the lower right foreground. His upper torso is sheathed in lily pads, while lotus blossoms sprout from various parts of his body.

Fantazos identifies this figure as a water god rooted in the locality depicted.

And what locality is this, exactly? The artist doesn’t tell us, but he provides some geographical clues: In the middle distance a verdant marsh lines the opposite shore, and beyond it is a panoramic view of a small town in the American South, somewhere

along its coastal plains. This bucolic panorama is distinguished by water towers, a silo, a windmill, a gas station (“Dixie Gas”), several houses, and steepled churches. Most dramatic of all the painting’s features, the darkly clouded sky above this anonymous little town serves as a backdrop for multiple tornadoes that loom unpredictably on the horizon. Maybe someplace in Louisiana, on a very ominous day.

The residents of this lowland hamlet are nowhere to be seen, perhaps sheltering in place after heeding storm alerts. If necessary, the alligators and Lily-pad Man can dive below the water’s surface and presumably avoid any fierce winds that might blow over.

A painting that tries to exhaust a theme—that’s how Fantazos characterizes Nenufarium—aspiring to an effect much like Jan van Eyck or Pieter Bruegel achieve in their most ambitious compositions.

In order to fully enter the phantasmagoric world of Henryk Fantazos, one must suspend disbelief and expectations. The outlier must be met on his own terms, which his more timid viewers will find unnervingly ambiguous—and perhaps unsettlingly familiar, despite all the gothic shadows and carnivalesque peculiarities.

The rest of us are free to revel and roam at will, as far as our imaginations allow.