Ernest Zawada
23.12.2024

Does anyone need beauty at all? Especially today, when we still live in the haze of postmodern relativism and perversely, although democratically we have the right to call ugliness beauty and vice versa. Indeed, beauty is useless, it can only make life more pleasant, and everything practical has a form that should first fulfill a specific function. However, in the well-known Platonic triad, the concept of beauty is at the top. It has a non-physical, perfect character, and is accompanied by goodness and truth. It turns out that even in Auschwitz prisoners needed beauty, in secret they created paintings and simple decorations. Nor did grey and gloomy communism eradicate this need. I remember our city of Bielsko-Biała from those years, when streets bore the names of Soviet marshals, ominous obelisks were placed in the squares, praising the deeds of the brotherly army, and tenement houses, although architecturally beautiful, were black and grey. The neo-Renaissance railway station was largely painted over from the inside with oil paint and was awful. Today, however, it is different. Its beautiful polychrome was discovered and restored. It has also regained its former glory from the outside. And the tenement houses, both in Bielsko and Biała, are being gradually restored and delight us, the onlookers, with their form, detail and colour. Someone is taking care that the urban space is aesthetic in its entirety, and that all its elements match each other. It is in this space that we feel good, because it is beautiful. Of course, there is no shortage of problems. The screaming cacophony of modern advertisements disrupts the beauty of this image, but this shortcoming must also be slowly solved. Although beauty is not necessary for life, it makes it more enjoyable and, thanks to this, perhaps a little easier.

Ernest Michał Zawada (born 1971 in Cieszyn) – Polish abstract painter, academic teacher, professor, dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Bielsko-Biała.