The Julian Stanczak solo exhibition, The Light Inside, is reviewed in Artillery Magazine.
"...Almost from the outset of his career, Stanczak was identified with the ‘Op Art’ movement that began to evolve long before the 1960s and is most closely associated with Victor Vasarely, especially the graphic work produced by his studio during the 1970s. But Stanczak, whose work was never as formulaic as Vasarely’s (nor, strictly speaking, formulaic at all) and far more chromatically subtle than Vasarely or any of his imitators, had a very different foundation—shaped and influenced far more by the theory and color and geometric studies of his one-time teacher, Josef Albers (with whom he studied at Yale). It was clear very early on in his career that his preoccupations were with light, movement and chromatic modulation. Graphic elements are very much put to the service of the chromatic dimension.
...What refuses to be ‘contained’ here is the color and light. Stanczak’s gift for the graphic gradient is matchless. The pink and blue modulations have an astonishing clarity that is Stanczak’s alone... It’s not always easy to ‘refresh the screen’ when the screen is a kind of black mirror. Still we’re always looking for other ways to look, to see; sometimes for other places, whether in the physical world or the imagination (one’s own or someone else’s)—or just a notional way to get to them. Or simply a different light over a different kind of horizon. There’s no such thing as a ‘safe place’; but sometimes a fresh horizon is enough."
March 12, 2022
