Aut pictura, aut nihil (Painting or nothing) was the slogan of the Aut Group which Antoni Fałat joined after his graduation. Fałat’s work is pure painting, uncompromising, out-and-out. It zeroes in on the human figure – his art is placed by critics somewhere between New Figuration and hyperrealism. He renders his subjects as flat shapes, deformed figures, painted with a limited palette dominated by black, white, gray and interjected with splashes of green or light blue. The colours, poses, en face view and central framing bring to mind photography and film stills. Fałat’s models seem to be taken out of a wider scene that was left out of the frame of the canvas but compels the beholder in its mysteriousness. In the later period, old photos, sentimental portraits retrieved from family albums, other people’s memorabilia, and professional prints by amateur photographers were substituted by photographic images of scenes staged by the artist with the help of his friends to be used as studies for his paintings.
Fałat is a graduate of the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts and a former student of Aleksander Kobzdej. In 1992 he founded the private European Academy of Arts in Warsaw, becoming its rector. He is not the author of Portrait of a man with a pipe or The return from hunting with a bear, which were painted by Julian Fałat, Antoni’s ancestor.