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"The paintings compress history and myth into dense, haunted spaces, where beauty and darkness cannot be separated."
Richard Wlodarczak
Biography
Richard Wlodarczak (pr. Vlow-DAR-chuk) was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba in 1972 and raised in a Roman Catholic household by Polish parents. He received his BFA from the University of Manitoba (Gold Medal Recipient for Highest Standing in Fine Arts) and his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, then traveled through Europe to explore art history and his Polish heritage. He now lives and works in Vancouver, BC.
Wlodarczak creates figurative and abstract paintings that channel the raw energy of German Expressionism, Abstract Expressionism, Neo-Expressionism, and post-Cubist influences into contemporary form. His process is both visceral and deliberate, allowing symbols and figures to emerge from raw intuition. His paintings compress history, myth, and existential questions into transcendent visions where beauty and darkness prove inseparable.
His current work explores modern surrealism, conjuring personal iconography through singular, monumental forms that embody human archetypes. Earlier in his career, themes of Christian and Pagan dualism shaped his practice, informed by his Catholic upbringing. Over decades, this evolved toward more universal symbols: arches, triads, abstracted figures that speak to fundamental tensions of order and chaos, material and spiritual, density and reduction.
Wlodarczak’s paintings have been exhibited and collected across Canada, the United States, and Europe.
Artist Statements
2025 - Obscura Ortus
I follow the undertow. Symbolic figures emerge from beneath conscious thought, instinct meeting intention as deliberate choices collide with passages of chaos. “Obscura Ortus” continues the thread of The Inherent Icon, exploring the tension between ambiguity and structure, revealing meaning that rises from what lies below the surface.
The figures tell their own stories, arriving with narratives already embedded, names that reveal themselves through the process: The Remnant, The Exile, The Vessel. Some paintings begin through fluid, spontaneous mark-making. Others are pre-composed before transferring to canvas, yet even these planned works transform as paint and intuition reshape the original design.
Heads fragment and obscure. The figure dissolves into object and ground. Some paintings evoke surreal mystery. Others push toward the grotesque, distorted, dissolving figures marked by sadness. But some are beautiful under darkness, and that is where meaning lives.
The series shifts from color to black and white at its midpoint, drawing the work closer to shadow and memory. These paintings delve into the hardship of being human and the blessings of humanity, touching on despair, depression, anxiety, excavating the emotional architecture beneath the surface. I don’t judge what emerges. I accept and surrender to it.
The small format intensifies the intimacy. These paintings don’t illustrate. They reveal. Each one becomes a doorway into what cannot be fully known.
2024 - The Inherent Icon
Grappling with the timeless human condition, "The Inherent Icon” conjures a personal iconography that echoes religious symbolism while forging its own spiritual language through modern abstraction and surrealism. These iconographic characters and archetypes named themselves through the creative process, capturing our eternal fears, desires, struggles, triumphs, and inherent spirituality.
“The Philosopher”, the first and the impetus of the series, bridges past and present through abstract forms and muted tones, while the use of red continues to signify an enduring life force. Layers, textures and fragmented features accumulate into a shared, evolving human experience: a vortex of cognition.
Throughout the series, the figures are constructed and masked, as if thought itself needs structure and concealment to exist. Fragmented angular compositions and tensely balanced colours shape the visual language, giving each persona a dynamic energy. They are not icons of worship, but of inner life: shaped by the effort of thinking, believing, and trying to stay whole.
This series marks a formal shift from my earlier architectural abstractions. Where previous work featured densely packed compositions with decaying arches, aqueducts, and heavy vertical forms often arranged in triads throughout the canvas, The Inherent Icon reduces and centralizes, focusing on singular emblematic forms with areas of heavy impasto.
These symbols are inherent within all of us, embodying multitudes: the optimist and the cynic, the artist and the watcher, the sacred and the profane.
The Philosopher - 67"x 47" - oil on canvas - 2024
The Philosopher - 67"x 47" - oil on canvas - 2024
On "The Inherent Icon" series:
"Contemporary theologians acknowledge the astonishing renaissance of religious involvement in contemporary art that is taking place in the present, and Richard Wlodarczak is at the vanguard of this Renaissance.
His recent body of work engages contemporary public art historical discourse to evoke a theological aesthetic by subtly referencing religious iconography framed in a renaissance humanism context. Are we looking at a crucifixion, a pieta, or a descent from the cross? His contemplative, phenomenological approach necessitates placing before the viewer a rendition of a secular figure subject to the auguries of existential angst characterized by uncertainty, frailty, and compassion.
His imagery evokes an art practice serviced in the context of liturgy and worship."
James Finlay - James Finlay Fine Art Appraisals. July 7, 2024
"Richard Wlodarczak's new work harkens back to his previous paintings, which I regarded as very serious. Now, he singles out new characters, establishing his belief system. This reflects his faith in the creation of these figures and images. They are ominous, mythological, and imbued with a powerful sense of personality. These paintings are world-class"
Mark Gaskin - Postmodern Painter. May 20, 2024
2023 - Sanguis Mundi
The Sanguis paintings reduce a recurring symbol to its essence: the arch becomes a single red vertical bar suspended over abstracted landscapes. This form exists in tension, both column and window, anchor and rupture.
The red represents life force, consciousness, memory. It cuts through textured fields of sky, sea, earth, and mind (Sanguis Caeli, Maris, Terrae, Mentis) like a pulse of thought, a flash of awareness breaking through. The paintings set up collisions between order and chaos, nature and technology, logic and spirituality.
The vertical measures, marks, connects, or severs. It reads as intervention, anxiety, or simply the human need to make meaning.
These paintings emerged during a period of personal transformation and growth. Interestingly, since I began this series, I’ve noticed similar motifs appearing in other contemporary work: red forms against atmospheric fields. It suggests something collective happening, a shared visual language.
Sanguis Maris - 48"x 48" - oil on canvas - 2023
2000-2020 - Descent and Ascent
These paintings span two decades, moving away from explicit Christian iconography toward more universal symbols: arches as ghosts of past civilizations, triads of figures locked in ritual, prairie landscapes that feel both romantic and desolate.
I wanted monumental work with real physical and existential weight. I made paintings I wanted to see. Using tar and rye from my mother’s garden, I built dense, layered surfaces. The tar gave me those rich blacks and incredible texture; the rye added something earthy and symbolic. Drips where they wanted to be - controlled and free, unapologetic. The paintings are packed. Verticals and arches divide the canvas into separate zones, each section working as its own composition. Aqueducts, bridges, decaying monuments break up the space while suggesting empires rising and falling. Between these structures: figures, abstract passages, blocks of color, and looming skies.
The triads appear throughout, echoing the three graces and Christ with the two thieves, but without the religious specificity. These groupings became about human connection, tension, witnesses to something unspoken. The prairie fields stretch toward vanishing points with relic architectures floating above, that particular wasteland beauty, the loneliness.
Some paintings moved toward geometric play and cubist influence, with faces simplified into primitive mask-like forms. Other works isolated solitary figures, a single form contemplating emptiness.
I worked on multiple paintings at once, letting canvases sit for months or years. The work shifted constantly between abstraction and figuration. What stayed consistent: verticals, arches, triads, layered surfaces, the palette of tar black, bone white, ochre, blood red.
Many canvases demanded density and accumulation. Others required bold simplification, just a few monumental forms. I was fighting my own instincts, an internal battle between maximalism and reduction, decades of believing more meant power, slowly discovering that less could carry equal weight.
This period encompassed both creative intensity and personal crisis, years when painting was both fuel and lifeline, followed by years when I couldn’t paint at all.
Looking back, I can see both an obsession and an embrace, a struggle against my own darkness and fears. The paintings compress history and myth into dense, haunted spaces where beauty and darkness cannot be separated.
Desiderium - 60"x 84" - oil, tar, and rye on canvas - 2004
2004 - Process and Spirit
From a letter to a friend
"My artist statements may touch on this, but : I believe my art is an attempt to reconnect with the spiritual - a higher creative energy. It's an escape...a spiritual escape. The stories and characters create themselves, constantly changing. In this way, the process is everything. When I'm in the middle of it, in the zone, I'm creating problems, puzzles and stories for myself to solve and resolve. When one section of the painting works (it may only be a few square inches), it can be strong enough to shift the entire direction of the problem or story, leading to more challenges. I use "problems" and "stories" interchangeably because they exist within each other.
The "problem" refers to what works for me in terms of the visual relationships of colour, form, composition, etc., things learned from years of flipping through art books, magazines, movies and formal art school training. But, the "story" is the realm of myths and collective consciousness - the light in the cracks. So, when the story or myth starts to surface, the physical paint on canvas must carry it. That's the dance, a cycle of obsession, where the physical and the spiritual are in constant play. It goes in circles until something tells me to stop...or, at least, stop for now.
This may explain some of my techniques (techniques that emerge by default of the process). I'm fortunate to have many unresolved paintings surrounding me (physically) which, when reworked over weeks, months or years, accumulate layers of "ghost paintings." These relics and textures from old stories and unresolved problems add new dimensions - both spiritually and physically - to the painting and the process. Shapes, marks and characters from earlier stages are saved or carried over to the next. Often, it's only very small portions. These former "negative" spaces frequently become "positive" in the formal sense.
The possibilities are infinite, and thus, a painting could be worked on forever, with the story and problems perpetually changing and repeating...history. Having more than one canvas to work on allows for a break or pause in the painting's lifecycle, freezing a chosen moment or place in time. A current painting then gives birth to a new chapter or version of the story. Explaining why I choose to take these breaks is very difficult. Sometimes material necessity (the process must be self-sustaining - i.e., sold as a commodity) is a consideration, and sometimes pure instinct reigns. In this way, a multitude of layers and levels of existence is created and experienced. This is the spiritual connection - or the spritual opiate, if you will - and the attempt to reach it."
2004 - Breaking the Image
With the new works, a conscious effort has been made to reduce the characters and forms to both a progressive and regressive state of Abstract Expressionism. While not completely void of subject matter (early themes of Christian/Pagan duality remain), the new works become more elusive in meaning. The recent abstract paintings prove to be a powerful vehicle for the recurring emersion of the "multiple image", leaving numerous interpretations to the audience. Questions and statements are replaced by an acceptance of ambiguity and the enigmatic.
By primarily focusing on a painting's visual elements: composition, space, colour, texture, line and form, two eternal and opposing principles naturally emerge: order and chaos. As all duplicities, these two concepts are both distinct from one another and existent within each other.
Modern sensibilities are counteracted by primitive influences and energies. Paintings rely on visual relationships. Clean form, awareness of space and composition, and colour theory are balanced with aggressive brush strokes, primal techniques and relic textures of process painting.
"If my devils are to leave me, I am afraid my angels will take flight as well." - Rilke
Painting through process has allowed the art to become absolute: to grow in power unprompted and unguarded, yet still cultivated by learned hands and eyes. In this indeterminable space, angels and demons are reborn with freedom of being… in the abstract.
Ship of Fools - 54"x 78" - oil and tar on canvas - 2003
1996 - Angels and Demons
"Works of art cannot always be understood by the intellect, nor can their effect be conveyed by words. Perhaps through some analogy with a religious faith or a sexual attraction can one begin to approach a work of art." - Marcel Duchamp.
The Christian/Pagan Dualism that underlines my work is one of many themes that surface in my imagery from some psychic memory or remnant from the past. Christian imagery and icons are mingled with symbols of sexual energy and consciousness, ritual and death. Questions of fear, desire, guilt and morals are raised. Often parallel religions and mythologies are introduced: creating a new and personal religion.
The creatures that roam this personal church know many other dualities: body and mind, flesh and spirit, male and female, light and dark. In constant conflict with each other, the truth lies at the center of the paradox, in cracks invisible, only glimpsed for a moment.
"One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light but by making the darkness conscious. - C.G.Jung
The creative process reflects spontaneously generated impulses that reveal themselves in casual drawing. Figures take shape and situations suggest themselves that prompt myself toward a more focused and conscious interest in these beings and what they may reflect in my life.
In this realm of revelation and apocalyptic animatism, art is not a medium on canvas, nor is it the molding of clay. Art is giving birth to our angels and demons, giving them wings and names, and an arena in which to dance."
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