North Carolina artist hosts exhibition at Red Springs Art Space

RED SPRINGS — North Carolina artist Henryk Fantazos’ works will be on display at the Red Springs Art Gallery starting on May 11.

Fantazos has been fascinated with art since he was a small child, experimenting with paper and pencil as his family had to move quickly out of war-torn parts of Poland.

“I was drawing, and not so much painting as using colored pencils,” Fantazos said, “and then I went into painting, and then never stopped.”

Regardless of Fantazos’ passion, his parents were concerned that he wouldn’t be capable of paying his way through life with his art, even throughout his education at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, Poland.

It wasn’t until Fantazos sold his first few works right out of school that his family’s worries eased. He has not stopped creating since then, taking inspiration from the environments around him and building on them until his works become visual poetry.

Fantazos said being a full-time artist is an extremely engaging profession, as opposed to many more common jobs that could leave someone paying half-attention while counting down the hours until their shift is over. Painting gives him the freedom to see something he loves, whether it’s a location, a person, or anything else. Rather than simply appreciating it and leaving it behind, he can capture its beauty on canvas and honor the beautiful scenes he sees more permanently.

“Say you fall in love with somebody’s face,” Fantazos said. “You tell her and she’s happy, but that’s nothing because it just evaporates into nothingness once the words are done being said. Now when you’re a painter, you can praise it in more elaborate ways, and then it’s something.”

Fantazos says that all of his paintings were created with the same mindset he would use to paint a praise of someone’s appearance.

“Imagine that you’re not painting a woman, but a tree,” he said. “It takes the same attitude. To paint a tree is to answer the question, ‘How much did you love it?’”

Despite what many may think at first glance, Fantazos’s style is not surrealism. His paintings are representations of the real world through a lens of poetry, inspired by William Empson’s 1930 literary criticism “Seven Types of Ambiguity.” He has owned a copy of the book since he first read it, citing it as one of his favorite works.

“’The Seven Types of Ambiguity’ studies English poetry, particularly Shakespearean language, that gets very poetical,” Fantazos said. “But as it gets poetical, it becomes ambiguous. There’s more than one explanation to the meaning to the word beyond the obvious.”

The literary criticism points to metaphors as one form of ambiguity alongside more complicated ideas, such as the presentation of conflicting points in text to indirectly communicate the author’s inner complexities to the readers.

These ambiguities are on full display in every detail in Fantazos’s work. His paintings can take many years to complete, as he continues to add detail after detail until he’s completely satisfied and unable to think of anything else to add.

Since moving to North Carolina over 40 years ago, Fantazos has drawn inspiration from the swampy land and small towns that are common in the state. A strong example of his love for the North Carolina swamp towns can be found in his painting Nenufarium.

“It has every element that I could think of that comprised a southern town,” Fantazos said. “There’s a Motel-6, an old gas station, many churches.” The gas station he chose to depict is Dixie Gas, a company that is no longer in business but used to be an essential part of southern communities. Fanazos said that he wanted to keep the memory alive in his work to honor every part of the South.

Alongside the realistic features of Nenufarium, Fantazos chose to represent many other features of the South in more fantastical ways. In the swamp, he depicted many alligators jumping straight up like they would to catch thrown food, though there are no tourists in the painting. A man covered in lilypads is presented as a ‘River God,” which represents both the natural beauty of the area and the feeling that someone may have upon seeing the southern wilderness.

“I want people to have a hell of an experience looking at my art,” Fantazos said, “and remember it because it made them feel something.”