Andy Krzystek

Buffalo artist Andy Krzystek produces works that utilizes painting, drawing, and printmaking techniques in a hybrid fashion that explores a humanist connection between and among people. Along the way, Krzystek’s various artistic techniques introduce and accept elements like error, nuance, and risk in a manner that encourages viewers to embrace spontaneity and the unknown.

He has spoken in the past of diving into the physicality of the moment, exemplified directly by many of the treated grounds he prepares for his works—applying pigment to the wheels of his skateboard, Krzystek will often carve and grind his way across a board or canvas until the plane is sufficiently textured and offers a suitable background upon which to then draw and paint. This erratic, spontaneous mark-making provides an energetic substrate upon which Kyzystek’s quietly composed portraits can reside. In the end, many works evoke a sense of tension leavened by calm, suggesting a lively emotional state that lives beneath a placid, well-composed surface.

It is a spirited treatment of imagery that fills the figure/ground relationship in his work with a lively air even when the disparate marks evoke an ambiguous state. Is there tension and anguish here? Are we in a state of confusion? Or are we witnessing a radiant energy with so much positive friction it cannot be contained? Many of these works contain both a composed stillness and a wild restlessness depicting a duality of lived experience.

Whether drawing upon skateboard marks or a previously printed surface, Krzystek accepts “error” and the satisfying heat of the moment with slower, more intentional mark-making. His color palettes often lean toward a minimum of hues and formally introduce a sedate ambience upon what are often vigorous surfaces beneath.